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Faculty Fellow

Larissa Brewer-García

Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature University of Chicago

Biography

Larissa Brewer-García specializes in colonial Latin American studies, with a focus on cultural productions of the Caribbean, the Andes, and the African diaspora. Within these areas, her interests include gender studies, literature and law, genealogies of race and racism, humanism and Catholicism, and translation studies. She is also a co-founder, with Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Cécile Fromont, of the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture (now a joint project with the University of Chicago and Yale University). Her first book, Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada (Cambridge University Press, 2020), examines the influence of black interpreters and spiritual intermediaries in the creation and circulation of notions of blackness in writings from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish America. The book was awarded the Flora Tristán Book Prize for Peruvian Studies by the Latin American Studies Association and the Friedrich Katz Prize for Latin American and Caribbean history by the American Historical Association. Her next book project examines narratives and images of holy men and women of African descent in early Spanish America.

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 ...