Visiting Speakers

Karen Benezra is Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, and Institute for Latin American Studies, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. 

João Biehl is Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology and Woodrow Wilson School Faculty Associate at Princeton University. He is also the Co-Director of Princeton’s Program in Global Health and Health Policy. Biehl’s main research and teaching interests center on medical anthropology, the social studies of science and technology, global health, pharmaceuticals, religion and society, subjectivity, and ethnography and critical theory (with a regional focus on Latin America and Brazil).

Emily Bloom is the author of The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931-1968 (Oxford University Press, 2016), which was awarded the First Book Prize by the Modernist Studies Association. The book chronicles the emergence of the British Broadcasting Corporation as a significant promotional platform and aesthetic influence for Irish modernism. Her current work examines disability and media in twentieth-century literature. She teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Bruno Bosteels joins Columbia University this year as professor in the Latin American and Iberian Cultures Department and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, having taught previously at Cornell and Harvard Universities.

Horst Bredekamp's work covers topics from Antiquity to contemporary art, and reaches both in the media- and in the natural sciences. The research foci of Horst Bredekamp are Iconoclastic Fury, sculpture of the Romanesque, art of the Renaissance and Mannerism, political iconography, art and technology, new media. In 2000, he founded the project "The technical picture" at the Hermann von Helmholtz-Centre for Agricultural Engineering (PAC) of the Humboldt University Berlin, which developed under his leadership visually critical methods, a theory of pictorial knowledge in the fields of science and technology and medical visualizations.

Tadeu Capistrano (Media, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) studies visual arts, aesthetics, film and video, cultural industry, modernization of perception, optical devices and new technologies of the image. His dissertation in comparative literature from the State University of Rio de Janeiro was on cinema, technology and perception. Capistrano is professor in the graduate program in visual arts and at the Department of Theory and History of Art at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He has edited several volumes of contemporary art theory for the Brazilian publisher Brochura and coordinates the ArteFíssil Collection, by the Contraponto editions. 

Glenda R. Carpio is Professor of African and African American Studies and English at Harvard University. Her book, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery was published by Oxford University Press in 2008. She is currently working on a book on immigration, expatriation, and exile in American literature. Professor Carpio recently co-edited  African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges (2011) with Professor Werner Sollors.

Horacio Castellanos Moya is a Salvadoran novelist, short story writer, and journalist.