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Faculty Fellow

Agnes Lugo-Ortiz

Associate Professor of Latin American Literature, Romance Languages and Literatures University of Chicago

Biography

Agnes Lugo-Ortiz is a specialist in nineteenth-century Latin American literature, and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Caribbean cultural history. Her work focuses on questions concerning the relationships between cultural production and the formation of modern socio-political identities. This is the subject of her book Identidades imaginadas: Biografía y nacionalidad en el horizonte de la guerra (Cuba 1860-1898) and of her current book-length project ”Riddles of Modern Identity: Biography and Visual Portraiture in Slaveholding Cuba (1760-1886).“ She is the author of numerous essays that address the interconnections between queer sexualities, gender and anti-colonial politics in twentieth-century Puerto Rico. Since 1994 she has been on the advisory board of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, and is co-editor of Herencia. The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States, En otra voz. Antología de la literatura hispana de los Estados Unidos, and Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage, vol. V. She is also the coordinator of the Humanities Division's Project Towards a New Americas Studies.

Featured Project

A sugar-cast pair of Nike Air Jordans

Slavery and Visual Culture

Project Topics:

2020 – 2023

Projects

Visual Regimes of Enslavement and Their Afterlives

Titus Kaphar, Behind the Myth of Benevolence, 2014.

Visual Regimes of Enslavement and Their Afterlives

This project will investigate how visual practices fostered during the slaveholding era in the circum-Atlantic world have underwritten or organized contemporary modes of seeing black bodies.
This project gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars who, in the context of closed seminars, public events, and digital exhibits, will investigate how visual practices fostered during the slaveholding era in the circum-Atlantic world have underwritten modes of seeing Black bodies beyond ...