Lourdes Dávila is from San Juan, Puerto Rico. A professional dancer for 25 years, her academic writing focuses on the intersection of photography, dance/movement and writing in Latin America. She has published on Julio Cortázar, Mario Bellatin, Diamela Eltit, Eduardo Lalo, José Luis González, Martha Graham and Marie Bardet. She is the founder and managing director of the journal Esferas, which provides a shared space for the production of art and knowledge for artists, critics, undergraduates and graduate students. Fully dedicated to the teaching and advisement of students, Lourdes has won twice the CAS Golden Dozen Teaching Award and received the NYU Distinguished Teaching Award in the spring of 2019.
Lourdes Dávila
Clinical Professor
Second Language Acquisition
Latin American and Caribbean Studies: photography and discourse; movement, dance and literature.
Current book projects: See It. Read It. Photography and Discourse in Latin America; Turn to Movement
Ph.D. 1994, Harvard University; BA 1984, Harvard College.
Golden Dozen Teaching Award, CAS: 2007, 2016
Distinguished Teaching Award, CAS: 2018
“La escritura en su lugar. El deseo del lápiz, de Eduardo Lalo,” Libros de la FaHCE—Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencia de la Educación, Centro de Estudios y Teoría y Crítica Literaria, CTCL—Argentina, 2019.
“Incitación del gesto. Teatro e historia en Máscaras, de Leonardo Padura Fuentes,” Iberoamericana, volume on Leonardo Padura, edited by Ana María Amar Sánchez, 2019.
How Puerto Ricans Made the Us Mainland Home (Coming to America: The History of Immigration to the United States). New York: Rosen Publishing, 2018.
“Cuerpo, foto, historia. La llegada. Crónica con ficción, de José Luis González”. Esferas, Velar la imagen/Develop the Image. Issue 7. New York: Department of Spanish and Portuguese, spring 2017
“Verlo. Leerlo. Eduardo Lalo frente a la escritura fotográfica latinoamericana”, Iberoamericana, Ana María Amar Sánchez, directora, Spring, 2014.
La variable Bellatin, co-editor of publication with professor Julio Ortega. Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana, 2012.
Desembarcos en el papel: la imagen en la literatura de Julio Cortázar, Argentina, Beatriz Viterbo Editora, July, 2001.
Managing Editor of Esferas, the undergraduate journal of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese