Estelle Tarica

Department Chair, Professor

5214 Dwinelle Hall

etarica@berkeley.edu

Office Hours: T, Th 2:15 - 3:15 pm (drop-in)

Department Chair Estelle Tarica (PhD Comparative Literature, Cornell, 2000) is Professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultures and a former Chair of the Latin American Studies Program at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching cover a diversity of topics: colonial and modern ideologies of race and nation in Latin America; Indigenous expression in the Andes and Mesoamerica; human rights discourses and memory debates after the Cold War; Jewish Latin America; and Holocaust consciousness in global perspective. Her first book, The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism(University of Minnesota Press, 2008), explores the subjective effects of racialized national identity constructions in Mexico, Bolivia and Peru, focusing specifically on ideologies of indigenismo and the works of Jesús Lara, José María Arguedas and Rosario Castellanos. Her second book, Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America (SUNY Press, 2022), is about the use of Holocaust memories and terminologies as reference points for authors and activists confronting state violence in Argentina, Mexico and Guatemala from the 1960s to the present. She served as the co-founder and co-director, with Ivonne del Valle, of the Berkeley research group “Mexico and the Rule of Law.” Her articles have appeared in edited volumes and in the journals ChasquiRevista de Crítica Literaria LatinoamericanaLatin American Literary ReviewJournal of Latin American StudiesPolítica Común and Yale French Studies, among others. She holds faculty affiliations with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Center for Jewish Studies. 

Estelle Tarica