![Carlos Fonseca cfonseca](/sites/www.mmll.cam.ac.uk/files/styles/leading/public/cfonseca.jpg?itok=ouKQE7-7)
Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages Raised Faculty Building °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²Ê¿ª½±¼Ç¼ Sidgwick Avenue °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²Ê¿ª½±¼Ç¼ CB3 9DA United Kingdom
Trinity CollegeÌý Sidgwick AvenueÌý °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²Ê¿ª½±¼Ç¼ CB2 1TQ
Carlos Fonseca is a writer and academic. His teaching, writing and research focuses on modern Latin American literature, art and culture, with particular emphasis on concepts of history, nature and politics. He is interested in the intersection between philosophy, literature and art history. He holds a PhD from Princeton University.
He is the author of three novels,ÌýCoronel Lágrimas,ÌýMuseo animal, and Austral all published in Spanish by Anagrama and in English by Restless Books and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His novels have been translated into more than ten languages. He is the author of the book of essaysÌýLa lucidez del miope, a book that explores writers as diverse as Ricardo Piglia, W.G. Sebald, Marta Aponte, Joao Gilberto Noll and Enrique Vila-Matas, among others. For this book he was awarded the National Prize of Culture of Costa Rica, in the essay category. He has written articles on topics such as Simón BolÃvar and Alexander Von Humboldt, Ricardo Piglia and technology, Roberto Bolaño and forensic aesthetics, Marta Aponte and the biographical archive, Enrique Vila-Matas and the avant-garde, Wifredo Lam and the postcolonial imagination, Teresa Margolles’s counter-forensic archives, Euclides da Cunha and geohistory, Antonion Artaud and his Mexican journeys, among others….
His academic monographÌýThe Literature of Catastrophe: Nature, Disaster and Revolution in Latin America,Ìýpublished from Bloomsbury, tells the ecohistory of how discourses on nature and discourses on history intertwined during the violent aftermath of the Latin American Wars of Independence. Synthesizing intellectual history and readings of textual production, and focusing on how natural catastrophes became tropes for thinking through historical eventuality during the 19th and 20th century in Latin America.
The first of his two new projects, entitledÌýThe Buried Archive: Latin America and the Rise of a Forensic Aesthetics, sketches a history of the rise of a post-memory witnessing aesthetic in Latin America, while simultaneously tracing the story of the rise of human rights forensic anthropology groups in the region.
The second project, entitled At the Brink of Dawn: A Journey Across the Colonial Fantasy, explores the works of Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, in its relationship to what, following James Clifford, we could call the ethnographic avant-garde. Following the triptych structure proposed by the succession of twilight (Walcott), night (Lam), and dawn (Césaire), the project aims toÌý think through how Lam’s post-human ecologies allow us to imagine the possibility of post-colonial futures after the so-called end of history.
Latin American literature and cultures
Caribbean and Central American Literature, Theories of the Postcolonial Imagination, the History of the Avant-Garde, Overlaps of Art History, Philosophy and Literary History,ÌýTheories of the Novel and the Historical Archive, Eco-humanities.
The Buried Archive: Latin America and the Rise of a Forensic Aesthetics
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Monograph
ÌýThe Literature of Catastrophe: Nature, Disaster and Revolution in Latin America(Bloomsbury Press, 2020)
Books of Essays:
ÌýLa lucidez del miopeÌý(Editorial Germinal) Winner of the National Prize of Culture of Costa Rica
Novels:
Coronel LágrimasÌý(Anagrama, 2015)
ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Published in English asÌýColonel LágrimasÌý(Restless Books, 2016)
Museo animalÌý(Anagrama, 2017)
ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Published in English asÌýNatural History (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)
Austral (Anagrama, 2022)
ÌýÌýÌý Ìý Forthcoming in English as Austral (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2023, and MacLehose Press 2023)
Ìý
Dr. FonsecaÌýwelcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students with research interests relevant to his.