My books and scholarly articles encompass a relatively wide range of countries and periods in Latin America, but they are all devoted to the intersection of literature, culture, and politics, with a focus on how rhetorical structures constitute and are constituted by political processes.

My first book, The untimely present: postdictatorial Latin American fiction and the task of mourning (Duke UP, 1999), discussed how the literatures of postdictatorial Chile, Argentina, and Brazil addressed the task of mourning following the military regimes of the 1960s-80s. The untimely present argued that postdictatorial Latin American societies produced a particular sort of literature and culture, marked by the imperative to mourn and to bury the persons and ideals killed by the military regimes. The book analyzed novels published by Argentineans Ricardo Piglia and Tununa Mercado, Chilean Diamela Eltit, and Brazilians Silviano Santiago and João Gilberto Noll. It helped establish the subfield of postdictatorship studies, won the Modern Language Association Kovacs award, and was published in Chilean and Brazilian editions: Alegorías de la derrota: la ficción posdictatorial y el trabajo del duelo en América Latina (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2000) and Alegorias da derrota: aficção pós-ditatorial e o trabalho do luto na América Latina (Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2003).

My second book, The letter of violence: essays on ethics, narrative, and politics (Palgrave, 2004), was also published in augmented Brazilian and Chilean editions, respectively in 2012 (Belo Horizonte: UFMG) and 2016 (Santiago: Palinodia). The letter of violence explored intersections of the representation of extreme violence in literature and in critical theory. It engaged Jacques Derrida’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s “For a critique of violence” in his Force of Law, in a chapter that has been lauded by luminaries such as Judith Butler and Andrew Benjamin as a pertinent critique of Derrida and an important contribution to the legacy of Benjamin’s essay. The letter of violence also offered an interpretation of Jorge Luis Borges’s “El etnógrafo”, his spoof on anthropology, in which I argued that in Borges’ story ethics is presented as leading ultimately to the undermining of the discipline. The book also engaged representations of torture in Southern Cone literature (Ariel Dorfman, Mario Benedetti) in the light of Foucauldian Page DuBois’s work Torture and Truth, which convincingly argued that the very invention of the concept of truth in Ancient Greece was bound with the assumption that slaves can be tortured in the court of law and will necessarily be truthful when tortured.

The Latin American editions of The letter of violence are considerably expanded and include two chapters on violence and nationhoood in Brazilian popular music, in Minas Gerais and world-renowned heavy metal band Sepultura and in the Pernambucan, Northeastern movement mangue beat. The book argued that heavy metal became increasingly associated with the political emancipation that acoustic MPB (música popular brasileira) once symbolized and was no longer able to sustain in the 1980s. The chapter on the Northeastern movement chronicled how mangue beat bridged the earlier separation of national and youth musics in Brazil by mixing international genres that were not part of the mainstream pop/rock canon (reggae, hip hop, raggamuffin’, heavy metal) and regional genres alien to the canon of Brazilian popular music (coco, embolada, maracatu, baião). My interest in music has also yielded an essay on 19th century music such as represented by Brazilian giant Machado de Assis, which won the first Itamaraty (Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations) essay contest and has since been reprinted in the commemorative volume and in various languages. In addition, my work on music has included a volume coedited with Christopher Dunn for Duke University Press and entitled Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship. Our introduction maps the history of relations between citizenship and music in Brazil and has since become part of illustrious collections such as David Byrne’s.

My two most recent books are Transculturación en suspenso: Los orígenes de los cánones narrativos colombianos (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 2015) and Crônicas do estado de exceção (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Azougue, 2014). Both volumes expand on my interest in culture and politics. The first is a short, 150-page opuscule on the origins of the regional canons of the Colombian novel. Colombia is the only South American country that did not constitute itself in unified fashion in the 19th-century and the book analyzes the separate processes that took place in the Caribbean, in the Cauca Valley, in Antioquia, and in the central-eastern region that encompasses Bogotá. Crônicas do estado de exceção is a collection representative of the work I have developed recently bringing literary-informed scholarship to cultural and political supplements of Brazilian print and online media. The book includes expanded versions of position pieces written for the Brazilian press in four major areas (US, Palestine, Spanish American and Brazilian politics) and addresses recent Latin American politics primarily in matters related to the environment and to indigenous issues. In addition, my recent scholarly articles have included a series of pieces on masculinity in literature and culture. This work, supported by a fellowship of the American Council for Learned Societies, has yielded a number of scholarly articles on Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges and Gustavo Ferreyra, and Brazilians Gilberto Freyre, Fernando Gabeira, and Cristóvão Tezza.

My forthcoming book is entitled De antagonismos e oxímoros: Retórica e luta política no Brasil do século XXI and is under contract with Brazil’s foremost press, Record. My hope is to finish it in time to bring it to print in 2020. It is an analysis of the rhetorical components of Brazil’s unique and complicated political processes since Lula took power in 2003. Particularly, the book addresses the past five years, marked by the greatest popular assemblies and protests in the history of the country, arguably the largest corruption investigation ever in Western democracies, and the election of the most extreme right-wing coalition to have emerged in the recent populist wave. Some of this work has been published in Luso-Brazilian Review, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, O Estado de São Paulo, Lugar Comum and other journals around the world.

My research specialty is late twentieth and twenty-first century Brazilian literature, cinema, and television with a focus on human rights and feminisms. My book Memory’s Turn (Critical Human Rights series, University of Wisconsin, 2014) sought to theorize the synergies between certain cultural works (including films, memoirs, TV miniseries and telenovelas, novels, and theatrical plays) and the institutional measures implemented by the State to reckon with the military-civilian dictatorship that governed the country for twenty-one years. It received a best book award from SECOLAS and honorable mention by the Brazilian Studies Association. While writing the book I also created and oversaw the blog Transitional Justice in Brazil maintained by Tulane undergraduate and graduate research assistants between 2012 and 2014.

While I continue to write about memory politics in Brazil, my research has increasingly focused questions of gender and sexuality. I am currently working on a project that traces the trajectory of Brazilian feminisms (in the plural) from the final years of the dictatorship up to presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. Some of my recent and current shorter projects meld these two areas of interest, such as my article in Current History exploring the relationship of human rights memory to Brazil’s 2018 elections and the mobilization of women in the #EleNão movement, as well as an essay, forthcoming in an edited volume on military memory in Latin America, that undertakes a feminist analysis of how military memoirs about the Brazilian military-civilian dictatorship have intervened in memory debates from mid 1980s to the current Bolsonaro administration. I’m currently working on a feminist rereading of the initial boom of autobiographical writings by Leftwing militants and revolutionaries, and article (with Fernanda Sanglard) analyzing the recent right turn in Brazilian memory politics, as well as an essay on documentary films about sexual violence in the wake of Brazil’s Primavera Feminista.

As of 2019, I am the Brazilian literature editor for the Luso-Brazilian Review, and have also served as an elected member on the Executive Committee of the Brazilian Studies Association (2012-2016). Since 2017, I have directed Tulane’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program (including its graduate certificate program). I teach courses on Brazilian literature and culture in the Department of Spanish and Culture and the feminist theory seminar for graduate students and majors in the Gender and Sexuality Studies program, and led Tulane’s summer program in São Paulo in 2014 and 2015. Recent upper level and graduate course topics include human rights in Brazil as well Brazilian cities.

Moisés Arce is the Scott and Marjorie Cowen Chair in Latin American Social Sciences and Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tulane University. He received his PhD in political science from the University of New Mexico in 2000. Professor Arce specializes in environmental politics, conflict processes, democratic governance, and comparative political economy. He is the author of Popular Politics and Protest Event Analysis in Latin America (University of New Mexico Press, 2024, with Takeshi Wada), Perú: Cuatro décadas de contienda popular (FLACSO Ecuador, 2023), The Roots of Engagement (Oxford University Press, 2022, with Michael Hendricks and Marc Polizzi), Protest and Democracy (University of Calgary Press, 2019, with Roberta Rice), Resource Extraction and Protest in Peru (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), Market Reform in Society (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), and numerous journal articles and book chapters. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. Professor Arce has served as a Visiting Fulbright Lecturer at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (2003) and as a Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo (2014).

My work considers site, space, landscape, and the politics of embodiment in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on Brazil and the United States. My first book project, Spatial Orders, Social Forms, analyzes the aesthetics of space in projects by Brazilian artists, architects, city planners, and politicians from the late 1920s through 1960s. This book touches on key moments in art and architectural history of Brazil, including social control and 1920s-30s urbanization projects, the Ministry of Education building in Rio de Janeiro, the founding of new modern art museums in Brazilian cities of the 1940s and 1950s, theories of the Concrete/Neoconcrete, and the role of race in performance by 1960s avant-garde. The book situates works of Brazilian art and architecture in longer histories of urban space from the colonial era to the 20th century, and poses questions about the phenomenology of political collectivity.

My ongoing research projects include a book on the spatialization of race in Louisiana coastal and riparian landscapes in the context of competing imperialisms (French, Spanish, British, U.S.), and a co-edited volume on mobile and temporary architectures in colonial and imperial contexts. I have also written essays on the site specificity of contemporary participatory art such as Dread Scott’s Slave Rebellion Reenactment (2019); approaches to understanding the architectural settings of works looted from West Africa; expanded conceptions of “American” art with attention to Indigenous archaeology; the temporality of architectures intended for migrants and refugees; DIY environmental design in micro-businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic; European museum collecting practices and ideas of “non-western art”; and the roles of Afro-brasilidade and Indigenismo for the pau-brasil and antropofagia aesthetic movements.

Ecuadorian writer Gabriela Alemán is one of the premier voices in Latin American Literature today. Best known for her fiction, she has published 9 collections of short stories, 3 novels, 1 play, and 1 essay collection. Her most recent releases are the English translation of her 2007 novel Poso Wells and the Spanish-language novel Humo, which won the Premio Joaquín Gallegos Lara for fiction in Ecuador in 2017. The exceptional creativity of Alemán’s writing has garnered her international acclaim, including a Guggenheim fellowship and a place among the Bogotá39, the 2007 Hay Festivals list of the best 39 Latin American writers under the age of 39. In addition to her writing, Alemán has worked as a journalist, editor, researcher and translator, and has played professional women's basketball. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Studies from Cambridge University, a Masters in Latin American Literature from the Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar, and a Ph.D. in Film Studies from Tulane, where her dissertation was supervised by Dr. Ana López. Now on the faculty of Universidad de San Francisco in Quito, she was a Greenleaf Scholar in Residence in the spring of 2019 at the Stone Center and returns this fall to continue the Latin American Writers Series at Tulane.

I am a historian of comparative black experience around the Americas, with particular interest in the different ways that black cultures developed during the years of slavery between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of my research has focused geographically in the Caribbean basin and chronologically in the nineteenth century, during the era of slave emancipation.

My 2006 book, “New Negroes from Africa”: Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean (Indiana University Press) explored how Africans rescued from illegally-operating slave ships by the British navy developed quite different communities and cultural practices depending on the specific places they settled around the Caribbean basin. This project originated as an attempt to explore how Africans who arrived in the Americas without the particular constraints of chattel slavery might have created community in ways both similar to and different from the majority of Africans who entered the Americas through systems of presumably permanent slavery. The book paid some particular attention to the impact of specific African cultural, geographic and political origins on the way that these people rescued from Atlantic slave trade built their new Caribbean lives. The administrative work done by colonial and local authorities around the suppression of the slave trade generated some peculiarly rich written records related to the actual journeys of slave ships; and in many cases even the life trajectories of their thousands of African captives. Such records have made these 250,000 lives more knowable—or knowable in different ways—than most of the 12 million Africans transported on Atlantic slave ships between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

While multiple European governments and the United States engaged in slave trade suppression, the most significant international anti-slave-trade campaign involved British naval policing of slave ships attempting to supply the nineteenth-century agricultural economies of Cuba and Brazil. British authorities most often described the people rescued from Atlantic slave ships as “liberated Africans” in part to distinguish them from other free black groups. Under the leadership of African and Cuban historian Henry Lovejoy, this population now has a specialized online archive and research center—LiberatedAfricans.org which project I have been a part of the contributing research group.

In 2002 around the time that I was finishing my first book manuscript, I presented a conference paper on the way that Africans rescued from illegal slave ships joined other free blacks in the Bahamas in becoming involved with local controversies over the international abolition of slavery and slave trading around Africa and the Americas. Specifically, the paper focused on the ways that liberated Africans, and recently emancipated people of African descent in sought to thwart U.S. attempts to reclaim a group of captive African-Americans from the slave ship Creole in 1842. The African-Americans in that case had staged a mutiny and brought the slave ship, originally bound from Virginia to Louisiana, into Nassau, Bahamas, a British colonial port, then almost a decade after British emancipation. The paper argued that the Africans recently rescued from Atlantic slave ships, and the longer standing black Caribbean population, expressed both an African diaspora consciousness, and a regional anti-slavery solidarity in their opposition to the attempts to re-enslave the Creole mutineers. Observers have rightly critiqued the way that British authorities often portrayed liberated Africans as literal human evidence of the depth of British commitment to emancipation, and even black rights. My own ongoing research focuses more on how liberated Africans themselves participated in the everyday experiences, and larger political debates, which shaped the so-called age of emancipation. Those debates at their core sought to shape the future of black freedom, in labor, politics, and social and cultural life, around the Americas.

My current book project is tentatively entitled Africans Imagine the Age of Emancipation: Revisiting the Meanings of Abolition through Nineteenth-Century Survivors of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The earliest liberated Africans rescued and re-settled by British authorities came mostly from Spanish slave vessels between 1807 and 1819, despite the fact that the majority of that time period occurred before the first Anglo-Spanish slave trade suppression treaty of 1817. As Jenny Martinez has shown in her work on The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (2014), over the course of the nineteenth-century British, Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian and U.S. authorities would develop one of the earliest international legal regimens focused on a human rights question. However, in the early decades of the nineteenth century British authorities processed such cases in national vice admiralty courts in three of their northern Caribbean territories, Antigua, the Bahamas and Tortola. In addition to the records generated at the time of the seizure of these slave ships, in the 1810s and 1820s local colonial officials documented the daily lives and especially the labor experiences of these free African settlers, in part looking to them as a possible model for how more universal slave emancipation might occur. My manuscript in progress uses these records to reconstruct a black-centered commentary and critique of this often celebrated era of regional emancipation.

I am also working on a collective biography of a group of liberated African men who entered into British military service and ended up stationed in Havana harbor as a part of mid-nineteenth-century British agreements with Spain for joint suppression of the illegal slave trade to Cuba. This project particularly seeks to explore the relationship between these free African men serving as British colonial subjects and the diverse groups of African and African-descended populations in Havana, both free and enslaved. Despite the longstanding presence of various free people of African descent in Cuba, as elsewhere in the Spanish colonial Americas, authorities in Cuba seemed to fear the specific transnational anti-slavery identity of this population. The project takes its title from the words of one Spanish official articulating this fear: “Negroes with the Habit of Freedom”: Black African Soldiers, British Abolition and Slave Trade Suppression in Cuba. Other related projects include biographical work on abolitionist David Turnbull, who briefly served as a British consul in Havana. Cuban authorities routinely suspected him of fomenting slave rebellion; and he may indeed have had an idealized vision of a revolutionary slave uprising in Cuba, assisted by free black populations from adjacent British Caribbean territories. I am also working on a micro history of rape and assault aboard an Atlantic slave ship in the mid-nineteenth century. The tracing of the lives of the captive Africans aboard this vessel and the assaults committed against them is made possible because of British and Spanish legal and diplomatic processes related to slave trade suppression. However, the project itself seeks to explore more widely the understanding of intimate violence against African bodies and minds in the long history of Atlantic slave trading.

At Tulane I have taught undergraduate and graduate students broadly in African diaspora, Caribbean and African-American History courses. I have also engaged in local public history efforts including co-organization of a 2011 conference marking the bicentennial of the 1811 Louisiana Slave Uprising. This rebellion has significant linkages to the Haitian Revolution, both in its ideological orientation and in the participation of enslaved people brought to Louisiana after the destruction of slavery in that Caribbean territory. I also co-direct, with Nell Bolton, of the Frances Gaudet Legacy Project, which is designed to build a publicly accessible history of this independent black educator and reformer from Mississippi and Louisiana. From 2013 to 2020 I served as the faculty administrative director for the Tulane Africana Studies Program

Professionally I have served on local organizing committees for the hosting in New Orleans of meetings of the Caribbean Studies Association, the Haitian Studies Association, the Organization of American History and the American Historical Association. I have also served on the nominating committee of the Association of Caribbean Historians, and on the board of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora.