Lecture: Kirsten Silva Gruesz

Date
Mar 3, 2020, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

Speaker

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Event Description

 

Photo of Kirsten Silva Gruesz

Abstract

How does Latina/o/x studies exert pressure on the memory-work of U.S. American cultural history, and especially on its figurations of racial identity? Reaching back to the early 18th century, this talk situates third-generation Puritan Cotton Mather within Spanish colonial and Indigenous spaces and translation practices. A theorization of errancy links this revisionism to the contemporary activist poetics of Juan Felipe Herrera

Biography

Kirsten Silva Gruesz studies the changing conditions of literary production and reception: who gets to say what’s good, or what’s worth remembering? What languages and linguistic registers have social power, and who gets access to them? She researches materials in English and Spanish from across the Americas from the 17th century to the present, with the mid-19th century and the post-NAFTA era  the key periods for her research. She also writes about and teaches contemporary works by U.S. Latinas and Latinos, whose experiences are deeply rooted in the entangled histories of colonization and racism that link the U.S. to Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. She is active in research clusters and initiatives at UCSC and elsewhere: in 2017 she co-directed a summer seminar in the history of the book in America at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts titled “Other Languages, Other Americas.” In these and other professional contexts, she spreads the gospel of comparative and multilingual approaches to “American” literature and history. She holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. from Yale University.

Sponsors
  • Department of English
  • Humanities Council