Ph.D. 2012, M.A. 2008 (Hispanic Studies), University of Pennsylvania; B.A. 2006 (Hispanic Studies), University of Puerto Rico.
Laura Torres-Rodríguez
Associate Professor
Laura J. Torres-Rodríguez’s areas of research and teaching include Mexican literary, film and cultural studies; Asian-Latin American studies; border studies; transpacific ecologies and poetics; archipelagic and decolonial thinking; feminist aesthetics; and Marxist theory.
She is the author of Orientaciones transpacíficas: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia [Transpacific Orientations: Mexican Modernity and the Specter of Asia] (2019). In 2020 the book won the first prize for the LASA Mexico Section Best Book in the Humanities, and received an honorable mention for the 2019 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize.
Her essays have appeared in Public Books, Revista de Crítica Latinoamericana, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Ciberletras, Esferas, and 80 grados. Currently, she is Director of Undergraduate Studies and team member in the Cross-Currents Bennett-Polonsky Humanities Lab (2021-22).
Her second book project, Undisciplined Bureaucrats: Women’s Labor and the Mexican Feminist Imagination explores a series of experimental literary works, films, and art works by Mexican women that evoke an alternative embodiment of the figure of the bureaucrat. These feminist fictions of bureaucracy represent original theorizations on labor and social reproduction, and alternatives ways of contesting public and privatized forms of bureaucratic governmentality, from border control to the debt economy.
In continuation with her first book, she has been teaching and writing on the conceptual and methodological challenges that arise when trying to think the (Latin) American Pacific hemispherically. Her project, The Latin American Pacific: Pelagic Materialities, Methodologies, and Poetics explores the aesthetic and cultural forms that emerge in the context of different transpacific economies and ecologies, to uncover broader Asian American, Pacific Islander, Indigenous, and Black histories that have been long neglected within hegemonic Latin American continental imaginaries.
Orientaciones transpacíficas: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia [Transpacific Orientations: Mexican Modernity and the Specter of Asia] Chapel Hill, N.C: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2019.
“Criminalized Borders and US Health-Care Profits,” Public Books, 7.14.2021
“On (Re)productive Worlds: Transpacific Materiality and Mexican World Literature.” Mexican Literature as World Literature, Bloomsbury Publishing, (forthcoming September 2021)
“Kairiana Núñez Santaliz, deportista escénica.” 80 grados, 3 de enero 2020 and Esferas, vol. 10, 2020, pp. 52-65.
“Into the ‘Oriental’ Zone: Edward Said and Mexican Literature.” Mexican Literature in Theory, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018, pp. 11- 31. 2019 Prize for Best Essay in the Humanities (Mexico Section LASA)
“‘Esto es un Western’: el giro del norte mexicano hacia el Pacífico en la literatura mexicana contemporánea.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, vol. 44, no. 87, 2018, pp. 89-111.
“On luciana achugar ‘Labor Brujx.” Indefinite Articles, NYU Skirball. September 2018.
“The Labor of Gender: Cristina Rivera Garza’s Feminist Pedagogy.” Critical Insights: Contemporary Latin American Fiction Grey House Publishing, 2017, pp. 217-137.
“Volverás (de los 1950) irreconocible…” 80 grados, March 6, 2015.
“Orientalizing Mexico: Estudios indostánicos and the Place of India in José Vasconcelos’s The Cosmic Race.” Revista Hispánica Moderna, vol 68, no. 1, 2015, pp. 77-91.
“Alejandra Pizarnik y la novela en práctica.” Ciberletras: Revista de crítica literaria y de cultura, vol. 22, 2009.
Sánchez Prado, Ignacio. Strategic Occidentalism. On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature. Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, vol.37, issue 2, Summer 2021, pp. 321-324.
Elena Olivia, Lucía Stecher, and Claudia Zapata, eds. Frantz Fanon desde América Latina: lecturas contemporáneas de un pensador del siglo XX. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, vol. 49, no. 3, 2015, pp. 599-602.
Shelley E. Garrigan. Collecting Mexico: Museums, Monuments, and the Creation of National Identity. Hispanic Review, vol. 81, no. 4, 2013, pp. 500-503.