Larissa Brewer-García

Larissa Brewer-García is an Associate Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Chicago’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. She holds affiliations with the Center for Latin American Studies, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. Her research focuses on colonial Latin American studies, particularly cultural productions of the Caribbean, Andes, and African diaspora, with expertise in gender studies, race formation, and translation studies.

Education: B.A. in Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University (exact year not specified), Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from University of Pennsylvania (2013). She has held prestigious fellowships including the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, the Franke Institute in the Humanities, and a three-year Ivy+ Mellon Leadership Fellowship. Current projects include a book on racial hierarchies in Andean religious portraiture and co-editing roles at Critical Inquiry.

Research highlights include her prizewinning monograph Beyond Babel (2020), which analyzes blackness in colonial Peruvian texts, and her work on visual culture in slavery studies. Her writing spans articles in Art History, Colonial Latin American Review, and William and Mary Quarterly, earning multiple academic awards.

• Awards: Flora Tristán Prize (2021), Friedrich Katz Prize (2021), Franklin Pease Memorial Prize (2021-2022)

She co-founded the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture with Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Cécile Fromont, and serves on Harvard’s Afro-Latin American Research Institute’s international seminar on Afro-Latin American Art. Teaching specialties include colonial Latin American literature, slavery studies, and translation studies, reflected in courses like Empire, Slavery & Salvation and Witches, Sinners, and Saints.