Estelle Tarica is Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University (2000). In her research and teaching she examines colonial legacies of race in modern Latin America, Indigenous and Jewish memory cultures, and the transformative power of testimony, fiction and poetry. Her first book, The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), explores the subjective effects of racialized national identity formations in Mexico, Bolivia and Peru. Her second book, Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America (SUNY Press, 2022), is about how Holocaust memory and history circulate in Latin America and shape the ways Jews and non-Jews understand the state violence they experienced during the Cold War period. The book explores how and why the Nazi genocide of the Jews became meaningful to Latin American authors and activists from the 1960s to the present, especially in Argentina, Mexico and Guatemala. Her work in the field of Latin American Jewish studies also includes articles on Leo Spitzer’s Hotel Bolivia, about Austrian Jews who found a refuge from Nazism in Bolivia, and on French novelist André Schwarz-Bart’s linkage of Holocaust memory and decolonization in the Caribbean.
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Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture; Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese
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