The John W. Kluge Center at the U.S. Library of Congress has appointed Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado as the 2020 Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South. Sanchez Prado is the Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
One of five Kluge chairs named each year by the librarian of Congress, in consultation with a distinguished Scholars’ Council, the Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South focuses on the history and cultures of Africa; Latin America; the Middle East, South, and Southeast Asia; and Oceania. The chair is occupied by scholars of great accomplishment “chosen solely for their intellectual and communicative abilities.” While in residence, scholars are free to pursue their own research within the library’s immense collections.
Sanchez Prado is a faculty member in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and in the Latin American Studies Program, both in Arts and Sciences. He is the author of seven books, including “Screening Neoliberalism. Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988-2012” (2014) and “Strategic Occidentalism. On Mexican Fiction, The Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World Literature” (2018).
Sanchez Prado’s Kluge residency will begin in May and continue through August. He will be working on a new project titled “Cosmopolitanism from Below: Mexican Cinema, the World and Globalization.”
