COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Lucille Kerr is Professor of Latin American literature & culture at Northwestern University, where she is also affiliated with the programs in Latin American & Caribbean Studies, Jewish Studies, and Comparative Literary Studies; she was a Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor from 2003 to 2005. Her teaching & research focus on Latin American literary & cultural studies (20th c., Boom & post-Boom; narrative fiction, theory; literature & film; testimonio; Jewish Latin America). She is author of Suspended Fictions: Reading Novels by Manuel Puig (U of Illinois P) and Reclaiming the Author: Figures and Fictions from Spanish America (Duke UP); co-editor of & contributor to Teaching the Latin American Boom (MLA); and founder & director of the Latin American Literature and Film Archive.  Her research--which has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, ACLS/SSRC, & NEH—has appeared in Criticism, Diacritics, MLN, PMLA, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Journal of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Symposium, among other venues.  A contributor to Latin American Literatures: A Comparative History of Cultural Formations (Oxford UP) and current Review Editor of Latin American Literary Review, she has served on the editorial & advisory boards of Authorship, Hispania, Humanities in Society, Latin American Literary Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures, Siglo XX/20th Century. Drawing on recent research and courses she has introduced at Northwestern, she is now working on "Jewish Readings in Latin American Literature &Culture.” The dissertations she has directed have focused on colonial and 19th-century Latin American literature as well as on 20th-century topics, including Cuban anti-slavery narratives, the grotesco criollo in Argentina, the new historical novel, the journal Mundo Nuevo, testimonial narrative and film, Eva Perón, and mestizaje and multiculturalism in the Americas, among others. She served as department Chair in 1999-02 and 2003-06.

Specific interests to Comparative Literary Studies: 20th-century Latin American literature; the Boom and post-Boom eras; literary culture since the mid-20th century; literary theory; Latin American Jewish literature and culture.