Guillermina De Ferrari
Position title: Halls-Bascom Professor
Email: gdeferrari@wisc.edu
Address:
1132 Van Hise Hall
Spring 2025 Office Hours
by appointment
Biography
Guillermina De Ferrari is Halls-Bascom Professor of Caribbean Literatures and Visual Cultures in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and an affiliate in the Department of Art History. She is the author of Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction (Virginia 2007), and Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba (Routledge 2014). Trained as a comparatist (Columbia University, 2001), she has published many articles on Cuba and Caribbean literature, photography, art and visual culture, and world literature. She directed the Center for Visual Cultures (2014-2018), and curated the exhibition Apertura: Photography in Cuba Today (Chazen Museum of Art 2015). She co-edited with Ursula Heise (UCLA) the Routledge Series Literature and Contemporary Thought (2014-2022). She co-edited with Mariano Siskind (Harvard University) The Routledge Companion to 20th and 21st Century Latin American Literary and Cultural Forms (2022). She was a Senior Fellow with the Institute of Research in the Humanities (2018-2023) and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Her book Broken Tropics: Arts of Contingency in Puerto Rico, Cuba and Haiti is forthcoming in the Studies on Latin American Art series with the University of California Press. Her research combines cultural studies, ethics, sociology and ethnography.
Education
PhD, Columbia University
Honors and Awards
2023-28. Kellet Mid-Career Award
2020. Guggenheim Fellowship.
2018-22. Institute for Research in the Humanities Senior Fellowship.
2017-19. Vilas Faculty Mid-Career Investigator Award.
Selected Publications
Books
Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba. London and New York: Routledge 2014
Comunidad y culture en la Cuba postsoviética. Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2017
Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2007
Apertura: Photography in Cuba Today. Chazen Museum of Art, 2015.
Edited Volumes
The Routledge Companion to 20th and 21st Century Latin American Literary and Cultural Forms. Edited by Guillermina De Ferrari and Mariano Siskind. London and New York: Routledge, 2022.
Futures of Comparative Literature. Ed. Ursula K. Heise, Dudley Andrew, Alexander Beecroft, Jessica Berman, David Damrosch, Guillermina De Ferrari, César Domínguez, Barbara Harlow, and Eric Hayot. London: Routledge, 2017.
Selected Articles
“A Horizontal Hospitality.” In The Routledge Companion to 20th and 21st Century Latin American Literary and Cultural Forms. Edited by Guillermina De Ferrari and Mariano Siskind. London and New York: Routledge, 2022; 320-330.
“The Clandestine Philosophy of Graffiti in Port-au-Prince.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism (2021) 25 (3 (66)).
“Science Fiction and the Rules of Uncertainty.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism (2020) 24 (1 (61)): 1–10.
“Reading Without Habits: a Caribbean Contribution to World Literature.” In World Literature – Cosmopolitanism – Globality. Berlin: De Gryuter Publishing, 2019; 152-171.
“Sobre Eros y tumbas.” In Antonio José Ponte, Contrabando de sombras. Leiden: Bokeh, 2018 : 173-198.
“A Caribbean Hauntology: The Sensorial Art of Joscelyn Gardner and M. NourbeSe Philip.”Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 27.3 (Fall 2018) : 271-293. (by invitation and peer review)
“Cuba: a Curated Culture.” In Latin American Cultural Studies: a Reader. Edited by Jens Anderman, Ben Bollig, Lorraine Leu, Daniel Mosquera, Rory O’Bryen and David M. J. Wood. New York and London: Routledge, 2017; 140-161. (2007 article reprinted by invitation to commemorate 25 anniversary of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies).
“Padura después del vendaval.” Co-authored with Vicky Unruh. A Contracorriente 13.1 (Fall 2015) : 1-12.
“Opacity and Sensation in Reynier Leyva Novo’s Historical Installations.” In InVisible Culture 22 (April 2015).
“Embargoed Masculinities: Friendship and the Role of the Intellectual in the Post-Soviet Cuban novel.” Latin American Literary Review 69 (Spring 2007) : 91-115.
“Aesthetics Under Siege: Dirty Realism and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Trilogía sucia de La Habana.” The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 7 (October 2003) : 23-44.