Emmanuel Velayos, Ph.D.

Emmanuel A. Velayos Larrabure, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Latin American & Caribbean Studies Unit

The City University of New York / CUNY Hostos CC

Welcome! I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Latin American & Caribbean Studies Unit at The City University of New York / CUNY Hostos CC, where I teach courses exploring the history, politics, and cultural diversity of Latin American & Caribbean peoples and their diasporas. I completed my Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, where I specialized in Latin American intellectual and cultural history. Prior to teaching at CUNY, I held a postdoctoral appointment at NYU and taught at OSU.

My research explores the relationship between lettered and performative cultures in Latin America, through the lenses of media aesthetics, postcolonialism, and race studies. I focus on forms of performative writing that involve corporeal media of visualization and inscription, such as gestural typography, calligraphic ornaments, graffiti, and tattoos. I have published articles about media experiments and the embodied dimension of intellectual practices in Hispanic Review, Chasqui, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Decimonónica, and A Contracorriente. You can find these and other pieces of my published work here.

My book project, Embodied Letters: Vernacular Experiments & the Performance of Writing in Latin America, 1808-1902, received the 2018 Sylvia Molloy Award for Outstanding Dissertation. My article “Painting Words, Drawing Republics: Embodied Arts and New Beginnings in Simón Rodríguez” (Hispanic Review) received the 2020 LASA Prize for Best Article, Nineteenth-Century Section. I have also been awarded fellowships and grants from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities,, L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, the Tinker Foundation, NYU, Emory University, and the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.

You may contact me at evelayoslarrabure@hostos.cuny.edu – I’ll be happy to respond!