COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Barbarita Polster is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literary Studies, with a home department in English. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she was awarded the Dean’s Graduate Scholarship, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Cleveland Institute of Art (emphases in Visual & Critical Studies and Visual Culture, respectively). Since 2018, she has served as a Lecturer at both SAIC and North Park University (Chicago). Her critical writing has appeared in Artforum (forthcoming), The Brooklyn Rail, ArtSpiel, Wrong Life Review, and Shifter. She studies and speaks English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew. 

Her work focuses on the study of code-switching/code-mixing, as applied to a range of research, including a semiotic code-switching when applied to visual and literary texts, a sociocultural code-switching in exchanges between people of different backgrounds, and an infrastructural code-switching in the anthropological study of the repurposing of public goods and services according to specific material needs. Understood as a historical bellwether, the cultural texts of Latin America and the Caribbean provide insight into contemporary questions of democracy, economy, and society; the region's cultural producers operating at the intersection of all three of these modes point to the revolutionary potential of their time. Drawing theoretical connections between such concepts as Bakhtin's heteroglossia and Glissant's creolité, she proposes the application of this loose framework to undergird further research into the cultural production of this region.