Biography
Mauro Lazarovich is a scholar of Latin American literature and culture. His research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American poetry, fiction, visual arts, and intellectual history, in Spanish and Portuguese, with an emphasis on migration, refugee studies, and human rights.
His book project, Citizens of Nowhere: Refugee Modernism and the Origins of Human Rights, examines literature and visual arts that respond to the mid-twentieth-century refugee crises spurred by the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Drawing on research across nine archives in four countries, it analyzes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and painting by figures such as Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, João Guimarães Rosa, Victoria Ocampo, Alfonso Reyes, and Lasar Segall. The book argues that Latin American writers and artists—many of them serving as consuls, diplomats, and lawmakers—created a language for the modern refugee condition before it was codified by international law, and helped shape the human rights agenda articulated by the United Nations in the postwar period.
His work is forthcoming in PMLA and in Argentine Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury; co-written with Mariano Siskind), and has appeared in Revista Hispánica Moderna and Historia feminista de la literatura argentina (EDUVIM, 2020; co-written with Mónica Szurmuk).
Before coming to Oberlin, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer in the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton University.
His courses explore Latin American literature and culture in connection with human rights law, technologies of movement control (passports and borders), and the migrant and refugee condition in modernity.
