We are pleased to welcome new members of faculty who work on Latin America.
Alessandra Santos joins the Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies from the University of Utah.
Alessandra’s interdisciplinary research examines cultural production during and after authoritarian periods in modern and contemporary Latin America, with a special focus on Brazil. She is particularly interested in dialogues between literature and the other arts; she studied the historical and neo-avant-gardes, primarily: appropriations, conceptual and performance art, artistic and political implications of production and consumption. Her current research explores the process known as democratization as it intersects with notions of freedom, globalization, social justice, and the dichotomy of public and private spaces. Her book Arnaldo Canibal Antunes (São Paulo: Editora nVersos, 2012) discusses cultural cannibalism as a concept of critical appropriations in the work of poet, musician and visual artist Arnaldo Antunes. She has also co-edited a volume (with Kim Beauchesne) entitled The Utopian Impulse in Latin America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Hannah Wittman joins the Faculty of Land and Food Systems from Simon Fraser University.
Hannah’s research projects examine the ways that the rights to produce and consume food are contested and transformed through struggles for agrarian reform, food sovereignty, and agrarian citizenship. Areas of focus include: agrarian reform settlements, citizenship and food sovereignty in rural Brazil in collaboration with the Landless Rural Workers Movement; socio-ecological resilience and community-based resource management in Guatemala; and local food system transformation, farmland protection initiatives, farmers’ markets and community-based farming in British Columbia, Canada. Her publications include the co-edited volume Environment and Citizenship in Latin America (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012).