BU CLAS Mini-Conference and Graduation Ceremony

This mini-conference will showcase our graduate students' recent dissertation research. Each presenter will give a 15-minute overview of their dissertation, followed by 10 minutes of audience Q&A. Reception with food and music will follow!

For those attending on Zoom, please register here and the Zoom link will be emailed to attendees the day before the event.

Constanza Robles

Title: Visualizing Latin-, Pan-, Hispano-, and Ibero-Americanism through art and architecture at international expositions: Buffalo 1901, Rio de Janeiro 1922, and Seville 1929

Abstract: This dissertation investigates the role of international expositions in shaping and reflecting hemispheric and transnational alliances, with a particular focus on Latin American participation. It challenges essentialist conceptions of “Latin America” by foregrounding the region’s internal heterogeneity and the competing national agendas articulated through architecture and visual culture. Through a comparative analysis of the 1901 Buffalo, 1922 Rio de Janeiro, and 1929 Seville expositions, the project examines how Latin American nations mobilized visual strategies to position themselves within or against the macro-national frameworks of Latin America, Pan-America, Ibero-America, and Hispanic-America.

Adopting a cross-cultural, hemispheric, and decolonial framework, this dissertation aims to study the workings of cultural imperialism in these exhibitions. It reveals how their visual culture functioned as dynamic arenas for negotiating neocolonial relations and competing visions of hemispheric and transatlantic modernity.

Rosana Hernandez Nieto

Title: Las narraciones documentales contemporáneas y la mediación: una lectura teórica desde la literatura latinoamericana

Abstract: My dissertation presents a theoretical approach to contemporary documentary narratives as characterized by an overload of mediation that challenges the work of literary critics and stimulates both an epistemological search for new concepts and a reflection about the role of literature and criticism in the 21st century. Drawing on a notion of mediation rooted in the Marxist tradition, I argue that documentary narratives respond both to the uncertainty of a globalized world and to the anxieties related to the excess and the accelerated circulation and consumption of information. Working with a corpus of Latin American texts that include Autobiografía del algodón (2020), by Cristina Rivera Garza, and La compañía (2019), by Verónica Gerber Bicecci, I propose that the formal excess of documentary writing defies long-established ideas of literature and traditional methods of interpretation, therefore resisting immediate assimilation and demanding sustained and prolonged attention. Due to its rhetorical and methodological similarities with critical works, I approach documentary writing as a mirror that reflects the image of the critic, making criticism aware of the limitations of its interpretive categories and its political potential.

Samantha Nadel

Title: Methodological Innovations in Studying Cash Crops and Globalization in Colonial Tlaxcala, Mexico: An Organic Residue Analysis of Cochineal Production Tools

Abstract: Cochineal is a vibrant red dye produced from the insect Dactylopius coccus and used by Mesoamericans to dye and paint for centuries, if not millennia. A widely circulated cash crop since at least the Late Postclassic period (1200-1521 CE), Mesoamerican cochineal revolutionized European economies, art, and science following its introduction to the continent. Yet archaeologists have rarely studied cochineal production, assuming that it cannot be identified through non-textual methods. In this dissertation I present a series of articles demonstrating that cochineal production is archaeologically visible and that the identification of artifacts associated with cochineal production can challenge narratives overly reliant on textual data.

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Host or Publisher Center for Latin American Studies at Boston University