Hoy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Present

 Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante Is a scholar of Mapuche origin who grew up in Tralcao, a rural village in the river region of Valdivia in southern Chile. He studied philosophy and social sciences at the Universidad Austral de Chile (1980-1985), obtained his MA at the University of Oregon (1995- 1997), and earned his PhD in Hispanic studies at Cornell (1997-2001). He taught at Harvard University between 2001 and 2009. Since 2009, he teaches Latin American and indigenous literatures, media and cultures at the University of Texas at Austin.

Adrián Gorelik (Mercedes, Argentina, 1957) is an architect, urban historian and leading commentator on urban issues in Argentina. His most well-known books are La sombra de la vanguardia: Hannes Meyer en México, 1938-1947 (1993, with Jorge Liernur), and La grilla y el parque: Espacio público y cultura urbana en Buenos Aires, 1887-1936 (1998). In 2003 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for a project entitled “The cycle of invention and critique of the ‘Latin American City’.”

Gorelik is currently a professor at the National University of Quilmes, Buenos Aires, as well as a researcher in the Intellectual History Program there. In 2002 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge.[1] Gorelik holds several editorial positions at academic culture and design journals including deputy director at Punto de Vista, Editorial Board member of Prismas. Revista de Historia Intelectual and Block. Revista de cultura de la ciudad y la arquitectura,[2] and Editorial Collective member of Public Culture.
Gorelik received a degree in architecture (1982) and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Buenos Aires (1997).

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Lina Meruane (Chile 1970). Her fiction work includes the collection of short stories Las Infantas (1998) and five novels: Posthumous (2000), Cercada (2000), Fruta Podrida (2007), Sangre en el Ojo (PRH 2012, published in 13 countries and translated into 8 languages), and Sistema Nervioso (PRH 2018, translated into 4 languages). His non-fiction books include the essay Viajes Virales (2012), the diatribe Contra los hijos (2014) and the chronicle Volverse Palestina (2014), which was awarded the Prize of the Chilean Arab Institute of Culture in 2015. Meruane has received the awards literary Calamo, Otra Mirada (Spain 2016), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Mexico 2012) and Anna Seghers (Germany 2011), as well as writing grants from the Guggenheim Foundation (2004), National Endowment for the Arts (2010), and DAAD Artists in Berlin (2017). She currently teaches global cultures and creative writing at New York University.

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Pilar Calveiro is an Argentine political scientist, a doctor of political science residing in Mexico. She exiled to that country after surviving at the Escuela Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) during the military dictatorship of the 1970s. In her writings she has made important contributions to the analysis of biopower and political violence, as well as recent history and the memory of Argentine repression. Her work has been published in Mexico, Argentina, and France. She is currently a research professor at the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México (UACM). Her publications include Poder y desaparición, los campos de concentración en Argentina (1998) and Desapariciones, memoria y desmemoria de los campos de desaparición argentinos. She also wrote: Redes familiares de sumisión y resistencia (2003), Familia y poder (2006), Política y/o violencia. Una aproximación a la guerrilla de los años 70 (2006) y Violencias de estado. La guerra antiterrorista y la guerra contra el crimen como medios de control global. (2012).

Carlos Gamerro is an Argentinean novelist, critic, and translator. His publications include the novels Las Islas (1998), El sueño del señor juez (2000), El secreto y las voces (2002), La aventura de los bustos de Eva (2004), Un yuppie en la columna del Che Guevara (2011), Cardenio (2016), the book of short stories El libro de los afectos raros (2005) and the books of essays El nacimiento de la literatura argentina (2006), Ulises. Claves de lectura(2008), Ficciones barrocas (2010); Facundo o Martín Fierro (2015) and Borges y los clásicos (2016). Three of his novels have been translated into English: An Open Secret (Pushkin Press, 2011); The Islands (And Other Stories, 2012) and The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón (And Other stories, 2015). In collaboration with Rubén Mira he wrote the screenplay for the film Tres de Corazones (2007), directed by Sergio Renán. In 2011, his play Las Islas opened at the Teatro Alvear in Buenos Aires, directed by Alejandro Tantanián. His translations into Spanish include Graham Greene’s A World of One’s Own, W.H. Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand, Harold Bloom’s Poetry and Repression and William Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice. He studied and has taught literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). In 2007, he was a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University; in 2008, he participated in the International Writers Workshop (Iowa) and in 2012 in the Edinburgh’s World Writers’ Conference.

Francine Masiello is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She works on topics related to Latin American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, gender theory, and comparative North/South literatures. Her books include Lenguaje e ideología: los movimientos de vanguardia de los años 20, Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation, and Literary in Modern Argentina, El periodismo femenino del s. xix, and The Art of Transition: Neoliberalism and Latin American Culture. She is also co-author or co-editor of numerous volumes, most recently a book on Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. Currently, she is writing on Joyce in Latin America.

Beatriz Sarlo is one of Argentina’s most important and influential literary and cultural critics. She has written extensively on Argentine literature and culture. Her own works have become classics in themselves and her essays are necessary reading to understand Argentina. Sarlo was also a founding editor of the cultural journal Punto de vista. Her books include Una modernidad periférica: Buenos Aires, 1920 y 1930 (1988), Borges, un escritor en las orillas (1993), Escenas de la vida posmoderna: Intelectuales, arte y videocultura en la Argentina (1994), La máquina cultural: Maestras, traductores y vanguardistas (1998), Tiempo presente (2001). Viajes: Tiempo pasado: Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo (2005), De la Amazonia a Malvinas (2014). 

Sarlo has taught at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Columbia, Maryland, Berkeley and Cambridge; she has been a visiting fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu in Berlin. She has also been a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Humanities. Sarlo also writes regularly for Argentine newspapers and her opinions in the Latin American press can range from art to popular religion and politics.