Lucille Kerr

Lucille Kerr‘s areas of specialization include twentieth-century Latin American literature, with emphasis on narrative fiction, the Boom and post-Boom eras, literary culture since the mid-twentieth century, literary theory, and, most recently, Latin American Jewish literature and culture, especially in the Southern Cone. She is affiliated with the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program and is among the Associated Faculty of the Program in Comparative Literary Studies. Her publications include Suspended Fictions: Reading Novels by Manuel Puig (U of Illinois P) and Reclaiming the Author: Figures and Fictions from Spanish America (Duke UP). Her scholarly articles have appeared in journals such as Criticism, Diacritics, MLN, PMLA, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Journal of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Symposium, and World Literature Today and she is among the contributors to the Latin American Literatures: A Comparative History of Cultural Formations (Oxford UP/FCE/ UFRJ). Her ongoing projects include a collective volume about the Boom era and a web-based Latin American literature-film archive, and her current research, which draws on recent participation in an NEH seminar on "Jewish Buenos Aires," deals with Argentine Jewish narrative and film in relation to prevailing Boom and post-Boom currents. Her research has been supported by grants from the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science Research Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has served on the Editorial Boards of Hispania, Latin American Literary Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Siglo XX/20th Century, and as Review Editor for Latin American Literary Review. She has directed doctoral research on colonial and nineteenth-century Latin American literature as well as on twentieth-century topics, including studies of 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 1999-2002 and 2003-2006.