COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Nico Fonseca is a Ph.D student in Comparative Literary Studies with a home department in Spanish and Portuguese. He received his B.A. in Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies in 2022 from the University of Pennsylvania. He is primarily interested in tracing the intersections and mutual constitutions of the environment (or “nature”) and contemporary cinematic cultures and aesthetics, with an emphasis on the relationships between Latin American film festivals, continental indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, and human/nonhuman relations in the Andes. Nico’s undergraduate thesis explicated the interpenetration of “Third” and “Fourth” Cinemas in Latin America, illustrated through a study of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces alongside Sky Hopinka’s Malni. Nico’s work also frequently engages with global political economy, the history of left movements in the Americas, and the ontological turn in anthropology. Nico was a Teaching Fellow at Breakthrough Collaborative, a Miami-based urban education initiative. He is a member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Cluster at Northwestern.