Laura Colaneri received her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago in 2023 and holds certificates from the University of Chicago in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation, entitled “The Sinister Southern Cone: Mood, Affect, and Horror in the Cultural Imaginary of Argentine and Brazilian State Terror,” examined the narrative strategies that Argentine and Brazilian authors, filmmakers, and artists have used to respond to twentieth century dictatorships, particularly the use of conventions of the horror genre in novels, a film, an experimental play, an experimental artwork, and archival sources. It argued that these conventions are used to create the sinister mood, defined as a pervasive sense of fear and apprehension in response to ominous but shadowy threats of violence and death, in order to make political violence more legible in the cultural imaginary of dictatorship; inspire an affective response in the reader or viewer that can help them approach the experience of state terror; and ultimately resist the shadowy nature of authoritarian power. Her research interests further include Southern Cone literature; dictatorship, authoritarianism, and political violence; cultural studies; horror and Gothic literature and film; and women's literature and gender and sexuality studies. Her current book project, provisionally titled Las Fuerzas del Mal: Esoteric Imaginaries amid the Occult Necropolitics of Latin American State Terror, examines depictions of Latin American state-sponsored violence as akin to occult practices in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and film.
Selected Publications
- “Gothic Horror and Dictatorship in Latin American Film: The Detention Center as Haunted House in Crónica de una fuga/Chronicle of an Escape (Caetano, 2006).” Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas. Vol. 19, no. 1, 2022, pp. 55-72.
Recent Courses in RLL
- SPAN 10300 Beginning Elementary Spanish III (Spring 2024)
- SPAN 22005 Latin American Literatures and Cultures: 20th and 21st Centuries (Winter 2024)
- SPAN 22821 Women and Horror in Contemporary Latin America (Winter 2021)
- SPAN 24524 Contemporary Women Writers in Latin America (Spring 2024)
- SPAN 27025 Discourses of Femicide in Contemporary Latin America (Spring 2025)