Jean Franco
Professor Emerita, Columbia University
Talk: “Cruel Modernity”
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
5:00-7:00pm in Humanities 202
Seminar: Thursday, February 23, 2012
10:00am-Noon in Humanities 202
For a copy of the reading, contact Courtney Mahaney (cmahaney@ucsc.edu)
Cruel Modernity is the subject of Franco’s forthcoming book on Truth Commissions and surviving the extreme cases of political violence that plagued some Latin American countries in the late twentieth century.
Jean Franco is a British-born academic and literary critic known for her pioneering work on Latin American literature. Educated at Manchester and London, she has taught at London, Essex (where she was the university's first woman professor), Stanford, and is currently professor emerita at Columbia University.
Jean Franco's research is wide-ranging and voluminous. She was among the very first English-speaking Latin Americanists to write seriously about Latin American literature. She has particularly focused on women and women's writing.
Her book, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, was awarded the Bolton-Johnson Prize by the Conference of Latin American Historians for the best work in English on the History of Latin America published in 2003. A selection of other publications includes: Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (1989); Marcando diferencias. Cruzando Fronteras (1996); and Critical Passions: Selected Essays, edited by Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman (1999)
Co-sponsored by the Research Groups of Transnationalizing Justice; Borders, Bodies, and Violence; and Latino Literary Cultural Project; the Chicano Latino Research Center, and the Departments of Literature and Latin American and Latino Studies.
Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research.
