Elizabeth Gray to Join CLACS through Interdisciplinary Opportunity
March 17, 2017
Elizabeth Gray to Join CLACS through Interdisciplinary Opportunity
The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University is pleased to announce that Elizabeth Gray, a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature, has been selected for the Interdisciplinary Opportunity at CLACS, offered earlier this year by the Graduate School.
Interdisciplinary Opportunities support advanced graduate students in the Humanities and Social Sciences in their fifth or sixth year of graduate study. These opportunities enable advanced doctoral students to participate actively in the activities of interdisciplinary Centers and Institutes at Brown, providing them a broader interdisciplinary context for their own focused work in the completion phase of their graduate scholarship.
Elizabeth Gray's dissertation, “The Poetics of Intervention: Art and Activism in Latin America’s Neoliberal Era,” explores the use of art and literature in recent social movements in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Brazil. Through the comparative analyses of poetry and more ephemeral practices of street art and activism, she develops a theory of collective poetic resistance in spaces of present-day crisis. Gray will share this research with the CLACS community in a public presentation during fall 2017.
Gray will teach for the Latin American and Caribbean Studies concentration during the spring semester of 2018. Her course, “The Art of Revolution in Latin America,” considers the role of the arts—visual, literature, music, film, and performance—in social movements. Students will study the work of artists and activists beginning with the Mexican Revolution, moving through the Cuban Revolution and dictatorship resistances, to the more recent Chilean student movement, narco-trafficking, and Ecuadorian indigenous protests. The course will trace the use of the arts in organizing, social critique, collective action, and propaganda, and how they have shaped ideology and culture in Latin America and beyond.
Welcome to CLACS, Elizabeth!