Sophia A. McClennen’s Research: An Internet Gateway
This page gives an overview of my research and links to work available on-line.
My research focuses on cultural responses to extreme social conflict such as that associated with war, imperialism, state formation, dictatorship, patriarchy, and globalization. I may have been drawn to this focus, and to criticism that links historical and individual contexts, by my own situation: the daughter of an Afghan economist living in the United States, I have experienced the challenges of biculturalism and the trauma of ethnic marginalization firsthand.
I was educated at Harvard University, where I majored in philosophy and graduated with an A. B. cum laude in 1987. While at Harvard I received the John Harvard scholarship for academic excellence each of my four years in residence. In addition to pursuing studies in philosophy and working with faculty such as Stanley Cavell and John Rawls, I began to refine my understanding of the relationship between ethics, aesthetics, and politics. A course with Carlos Fuentes on the intellectual history of Latin American literature where we read John Stuart Mill, Giambattista Vico and Erasmus alongside writers like Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel García Márquez convinced me that studying Latin American literature and culture in combination with philosophy would allow me to develop my understanding of the intersections of politics, identity, and culture.
After a two year break from academia during which I worked and traveled in Europe and Latin America, I began my graduate career in Romance Studies at Duke University in the fall of 1989. During my years at Duke I was awarded a series of fellowships, including a Tinker Field Research Award (1992) and an NEH Dissertation Award (1994) for the completion of my doctoral thesis on Spanish and Latin American exile writing. These awards advanced my research and gave me an opportunity to spend substantial time living in Spain and Latin America. Additional support from research awards provided via Duke allowed me to spend a summer (1990) and a semester (1991) in Madrid, where I conducted research on Spanish film during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco and on exile literature. During my graduate study, I was invited by the Universidad Metropolitana in Santiago, Chile to be a visiting scholar (Summer 1992) and by the Universidad de Santiago in Chile to teach a course on Latin American women writers (Fall 1993). During these trips I delivered a number of invited lectures. While at Duke I co-organized an international conference on Gender Studies and Latin America and served as the graduate student coordinator for the Duke-UNC Program in Latin American Studies. I graduated with a Ph.D. in Spanish and Latin American Literature and a certificate in Latin American Studies in 1997. My dissertation was a theoretical analysis of transatlantic exile writing and was completed under the guidance of Ariel Dorfman, Fredric Jameson, Walter Mignolo, Alberto Moreiras and Stephanie Sieburth.
In the fall of 1997 I became Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Foreign Languages at Illinois State University. During my tenure at Illinois State University I was awarded three university research grants (1998, 2000, 2002), a David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies Library Scholars Summer Grant to conduct research at Harvard (2001), and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award to Peru (2003).
While at Illinois State I was also awarded a Teaching Initiative Award (2000) and a Service Initiative Award (2001) in university-wide competitions for excellence in teaching and university service. I co-organized two international conferences on border culture (1998, 1999) and organized four special sessions relating to Latin American cultural studies at annual meetings of the Modern Language Association (1998, 1999a, 1999b, 2000). During this time I also organized four international film festivals at Illinois State (1998-2001) in addition to film festivals on human rights (2000) and women’s identity (1997). I was appointed to the editorial boards of Mediations (1999-2003) and CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (2000-present) and elected to the delegate assembly of the MLA for a three year term in 2003. During this time I also co-edited two journal issues: one on (Dis)locations of Culture: Chilean Culture after Pinochet with Ronald Strickland for Mediations and one with Earl E. Fitz on Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America for CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture.
In the spring of 2002 I was named Acting Assistant Director of the Program in Women’s Studies at Illinois State. That fall I was appointed to Pennsylvania State University as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature. I spent the spring of 2003 in Lima, Peru on a Fulbright and in the fall of 2003 I was appointed Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish, and Women’s Studies at Pennsylvania State University. I have since been named to the editorial boards of Comparative Literature Studies (2004-present), A contracorriente (2004-present), and Cultural Logic (2007-present). I have also reviewed manuscripts and articles for a number of presses and journals.
In the Spring of 2006 I visited Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada as a Fulbright Research Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies.
My first book, The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language and Space in Hispanic Literatures (Purdue UP, 2004), is a comparative, transatlantic study of exile writing. The book offers a theory of exile writing and claims that the literature of exile is best understood as a series of dialectical tensions about cultural identity. I argue that exile literature 1) describes identity as simultaneously national and transnational, 2) reflects both a historical and a cyclical notion of time, 3) depicts language as a vehicle for reality while also suggesting that language is incapable of meaningful representation, and 4) considers the creation of a community as both restrictive and comforting. The book maintains that, rather than favor one side of these dialectic binaries, scholarship of exile literature should investigate how and why these tensions persist.
My second book, co-edited with Earl E. Fitz, Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America (Purdue UP, 2004) is a revised and expanded version of our co-edited issue of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. The book unites a number of major scholarly voices on the role of Latin America in comparative literary and cultural studies and argues that, given its vitality and inherently hybrid nature, Latin America deserves a more prominent role in comparative literature publications, curricula, and disciplinary discussions.
My third book, Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope (forthcoming Duke UP, expected publication Summer 2009), has allowed me to continue to pursue my interest in studying culture produced in crisis since much of Dorfman’s work reflects the trauma of dictatorship, exile, torture, and national reconciliation. The first book in English on Dorfman, this study covers all of his work -- poetry, theater, prose, memoir, essays, film and other media -- in its critical and cultural context. I argue that Ariel Dorfman’s cultural production is simultaneously political and aesthetically complex. The book analyzes his work within the Latin American tradition as well as within the transnational community of intellectuals that has most influenced Dorfman’s writing. I propose that a thorough understanding of any particular aspect of Dorfman’s work requires appreciation of his multifaceted cultural production and of his personal history as they relate to Latin American and global developments. By combining critical analysis of Dorfman’s work with crucial elements of his life, the book suggests that Dorfman has consistently aimed at integrating artistic creativity and emancipatory politics, producing an “aesthetics of hope.”
My fourth book project is a volume co-edited with Henry James Morello entitled Representing Humanity in an Age of Terror. The collection of essays explores the complexity and difficulty inherent in efforts to represent humanity during moments of social terror. Essays included analyze how the politics of panic and terror associated with war, authoritarianism, fascism, empire, and globalization require the construction of an inhuman other. Some of the key questions addressed by the contributors include: To what extent do torture, genocide, and other forms of military violence depend on an impoverished notion of humanity? How do these forms of violent othering relate to social practices of racial profiling, patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, criminalizing of communities, classism, xenophobia and other ideological structures dependent on divisive notions of social identity? And what role has cultural production played in challenging these notions? How have cultural products attempted to mediate the trauma of terror, record alternative versions of official history, and suggest alternative, egalitarian worldviews? What role does culture play in the struggle for Human Rights? And how can the scholarly methods of Comparative Cultural Studies enable interdisciplinary investigations into the relationship between politics, aesthetics, psychology, and historical crisis? The essays that take a global view of the ways that these issues have shaped the cultural landscape of the 20th century and the volume includes the viewpoints of scholars, activists, and artists. This project is available now as a thematic issue of CLCWeb <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol9/iss1/> and will be published in Purdue's Series on Comparative Cultural Studies in 2008.
My current book project, Globalization and Latin American Cinema, focuses on the media landscape post 1989. The 1990s marked a significant shift in media globalization -- one that heralded the rise of free trade, the consolidation of media into the hands of a few multinational corporations, the waning of national quotas, and the almost total saturation of Latin America by foreign cultural products. Currently most Latin American countries screen 95% or more of their films from Hollywood. Against this grim picture of cultural globalization there is another story: The 1990s marked a wave of commercially successful films from Latin America and five of the top fifteen box office successes for foreign films in the United States market are from Latin America. What perhaps is even more noteworthy is the fact that many of the films on this list have left-leaning messages and are critical of neoliberalism and global capitalism. The goal of my book is to make sense of these two competing versions of Latin America’s relationship to media globalization. My central thesis is that understanding globalization and resistance in Latin American Cinema requires rethinking the parameters through which scholars have tended to frame debates about globalization and cultural diversity. The global-local dynamic, which has shaped to some degree almost all debates about globalization and culture, no longer works as a useful model. I argue that understanding globalization and resistance requires moving away from a focus on categories of identity to a focus on structures of power and politics.
I am also completing a a co-edited issue of Comparative Literature Studies on Human Rights and Literary Form with Joseph Slaughter that will be released in March of 2009.
Additional projects for the future include a study of the relationship between aesthetics and politics in inter-American culture from the 1960s, and a comparative study of the role that culture markets and free trade agreements play in shaping the relationship between texts and the public.
Here is a list of some of my research available on-line:
(For a full list of publications see my CV.)
Books:
The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language and Space in Hispanic Literatures, Purdue UP, 2004.
Read the Introduction to the book here. (To rotate the text, right click and choose "rotate clockwise" 3 times).
Reviews:
Deborah Cohn. About the Literatures of the Americas: A Review Article of New Work by Castillo and McClennen. CLCWeb 10.3 (2008).
Maria Helena Rueda. Comparative Literature Studies. 44.4 (2007): 507-10.
John Ochoa. Latin American Research Review. 42. 3 (October 2007): 297-307.
Jesús Hidalgo y Campos. Recherche Littéraire. 23.45-6 (Winter 2006): 43-5.
Alexandra Ortiz Wallner. Revista Iberoamericana. 6.22 (2006): 250-51.
Alda Blanco. “Contesting and Reconciling the “Ludic” Postmodern Trope of Exile.” A contracorriente. 2.2 (Fall 2004.)
With Earl E. Fitz, eds. Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue UP, 2004. Revised and expanded version of our guest co-edited thematic issue of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 4.2 (June 2002).
Reviews
Alexandra Hibbett. Recherche Littéraire. 23.45-6 (Winter 2006): 74-6.
Irune DEL RÍO GABIOLA. "Comparative Cultural Perspectives for the Study of the Americas: New Work
by Imbert and McClennen and Fitz." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 8.1 (March 2006).
Daniel John Nappo. Hispania 88 (December 2005): 771-73.
Articles available on-line:
"The Theory and Practice of the Peruvian Grupo Chaski." Jump Cut 50 (2008).
“The Humanities, Human Rights, and the Comparative Imagination.” In Sophia A. McClennen and Henry James Morello, eds. Representing Humanity in an Age of Terror. Thematic issue of CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture 9.1 (2008) http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol9/iss1/.
(With Henry James Morello). “Introduction” in Representing Humanity in an Age of Terror. Thematic issue of CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture 9.1 (2008) http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol9/iss1/.
“Area Studies Beyond Ontology: Notes on Latin American Studies, American Studies, and Inter-American Studies.” A contracorriente 5.1 (2007): 173-184.
"The Geopolitical War on U.S. Higher Education" College Literature - 33.4, Fall 2006, pp. 43-75. (Available on Project Muse.)
“Inter-American Studies or Imperial American Studies?” Comparative American Studies 3.4 (2005): 393-413.
David Ball, Sophia A. McClennen, Ariel Dorfman, Gordon O. Taylor. “Forum: Poetry and Torture.” World Literature Today 81, nos. 1-2 (May-August 2005): 6-7.
“The Diasporic Subject in Ariel Dorfman’s Heading South, Looking North.” MELUS 30.1. (Spring 2005):169-188.
“Exilic Perspectives on ‘Alien Nations.’” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. 7.1 (2005).
“Poetry and Torture.” World Literature Today 78, nos. 3-4 (September-December 2004): 68-70.
(With Earl E. Fitz.) “An Introduction to Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America.” Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America. Eds. Sophia McClennen and Earl E. Fitz. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue UP, 2004: 1-8. Reprint of intro. to thematic issue of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. 4.2 (2002).
“Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies: From Disarticulation to Dialogue.” Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America. Eds. Sophia McClennen and Earl E. Fitz. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue UP, 2004:111-36. Reprint of article from thematic issue of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. 4.2 (2002).
“After Civilization: The Theory and Practice of Introducing Latin American Culture.” ADFL Bulletin 34:2 (Winter 2003): 6-14.
“Así fue: Anti-colonial Narrative in Alejo Carpentier's Concierto barroco and Reinaldo Arenas’s El mundo alucinante.” A contracorriente 1:1 (2003): 51-81.
“(De)Signing Women: Mexican Women Directors and Feminist Film.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 36:1 (January 2002): 69-96.
"A Critical Overview of Ariel Dorfman." The Review of Contemporary Fiction 21:3 (2000): 81-132.
"Chilex: The Economy of Transnational Media Culture." Cultural Logic: an e-journal of Marxist Theory and Practice 3:1 (2000).
“Cultural Politics, Rhetoric, and the Essay: A Comparison of Emerson and Rodó.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 2:1 (2000).
Interviews:
“Ariel Dorfman’s Literary World” World Literature Today 78, nos. 3-4 (September-December 2004): 64-67.
“An Interview with Ariel Dorfman.” Context 15 (2004): 7-8.
Bibliography:
“Comparative Latin American Culture and Literature.” Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America. Eds. Sophia McClennen and Earl Fitz. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue UP, 2004: 220-66. Reprint from thematic issue of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. 4.2 (2002).
Send me an Email: sam50@psu.edu
