Dr Carlos Fonseca
- Associate Professor in Postcolonial Latin American Literature and Culture
- Fellow of Trinity College
- College Lecturer at Newnham College
Contact
Location
- Trinity College Sidgwick Avenue Cambridge CB2 1TQ
- CB2 1TQ
About
Carlos Fonseca is a writer and academic. His teaching, writing and research focuses on modern Latin American literature, art and culture, with particular emphasis on concepts of history, nature and politics. He is interested in the intersection between philosophy, literature and art history. He holds a PhD from Princeton University.
He is the author of three novels, Coronel Lágrimas, Museo animal, and Austral, all published in Spanish by Anagrama and in English by Restless Books and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His novels have been translated into more than ten languages. He was the recipient of the Anna Seghers Prize in 2024.
He is the author of the book of essays La lucidez del miope, a book that explores writers as diverse as Ricardo Piglia, W. G. Sebald, Marta Aponte, João Gilberto Noll and Enrique Vila-Matas, among others. For this book he was awarded the National Prize of Culture of Costa Rica in the essay category. He has written articles on topics such as Simón Bolívar and Alexander von Humboldt, Roberto Bolaño and forensic aesthetics, Teresa Margolles’s counter-forensic archives, Euclides da Cunha and geohistory, and Antonin Artaud and his Mexican journeys, among others.
His academic monograph The Literature of Catastrophe: Nature, Disaster and Revolution in Latin America, published by Bloomsbury Press, tells the ecohistory of how discourses on nature and discourses on history intertwined during the violent aftermath of the Latin American Wars of Independence. Synthesizing intellectual history and readings of textual production, it focuses on how natural catastrophes became tropes for thinking through historical eventuality during the 19th and 20th centuries in Latin America.
Published works:
Monograph The Literature of Catastrophe: Nature, Disaster and Revolution in Latin America (Bloomsbury Press, 2020)
Books of Essays La lucidez del miope (Editorial Germinal) — Winner of the National Prize of Culture of Costa Rica
Novels Coronel Lágrimas (Anagrama, 2015) Published in English as Colonel Lágrimas (Restless Books, 2016)
Museo animal (Anagrama, 2017) Published in English as Natural History (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)
Austral (Anagrama, 2022) - Winner of the National Prize of Culture of Costa Rica Published in English as Austral (Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US); MacLehose Press (UK), 2023)
Dr. Fonseca welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students with research interests relevant to his.
Research
Caribbean and Central American literature; theories of the postcolonial imagination; history of the avant-garde; overlaps of art history, philosophy and literary history; theories of the novel and the historical archive; eco-humanities.
Teaching and supervision
Latin American literature and cultures