معرفی
Alfonso Fierro is Assistant Professor of Mexican and Latin American literature in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. His scholarship examines utopian and speculative fabulation within Latin American urban contexts, with a particular emphasis on Mexico’s post-revolutionary period (1920–1968).
Education
- PhD in Latin American Literature, University of California, Berkeley
Research Focus
Fierro’s current book project, Utopian Habitations, investigates how radical writers and architects in post-revolutionary Mexico articulated utopian practices that intervened in urban struggles over housing, tenant rights, and living conditions. Drawing on ephemeral futurist magazines, socialist-realist novels, unbuilt architectural projects, and political pamphlets, the work situates these cultural productions as critiques of capitalist urbanization that nonetheless yielded contradictory materializations in Mexico’s urban terrain.
Complementing this historical focus, he has curated exhibitions and written extensively on 1970s–80s Mexican Mail Art networks, tracing how artists leveraged collaborative postal circuits to reimagine art’s social function.
Public Engagement & Media
- Regular contributor to Arquine architecture magazine since 2018
- Podcast appearances on Sur Urbano and Agitar
- Cultural projects: Jardín Lac
- Co-curator (with Pedro Ceñal), Cartografías Ocultas: Circuitos del Arte Correo en México, Casa del Lago UNAM & Museo de la Filatelia de Oaxaca, 2021–2022
Courses Taught at Northwestern
- Surveys of modern Latin American literature and culture
- Topical seminars on modern Mexican culture, infrastructural development, and futurity
- Interdisciplinary courses on Latin American/Latinx urban cultures through literature, film, and critical theory
