Ilka Kressner

My book Sites of Disquiet: The Non-Space in Spanish American Short Narratives and Their Cinematic Transformations (Purdue UP, 2013) analyzes representations of alternative spaces—including sites of deferral, merging perspectives, and regions of darkness and emptiness—in Spanish American short narratives and their adaptations to the screen. I have co-edited Walter Benjamin Unbound (2015, special issue of Annals of Scholarship Vols. 21:1 and 2; with Alexander Gelley and Michael Levine). My second joint publishing venture, with Ana María Mutis and Elizabeth M. Pettinaroli, is Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World (Routledge, 2020). Our volume examines the topic of ecological violence, particularly in the context of slow violence (Nixon) in Latin American and Latinx writings, films, visual arts and performances. Our most recent volume, Ecologies of Resistance: Arts, Activism, and Transdisciplinary Futures in Latin America and the Latinx Worlds, will be published with the University of Virginia Press in 2025. It presents critical studies, interviews, and artistic interventions on Latin American and Latinx cultural expressions and activism that challenge colonial and neocolonial ecological concepts informing the current environmental crisis. 

Currently, I work on two individual book projects: the first one examines how recent films and literary works from the Southern Cone imagine water, particularly that connected with rain, wetlands, and aquifers as powerful agents that connect the organic with the inorganic, expand beyond our human timeframes and spatial constructs. The second one is dedicated to the works of Colombian author William Ospina, tentatively titled, ‘“Man Doesn’t Know, But the Stone Remembers”: William Ospina’s Ecocritical Writings.’

Doctoral students working with me have worked or are currently working on topics such as: biofictions, postmemory and transgenerational trauma in the works by Chilean author Nona Fernández and Dominican artist/author Rita Indiana; ‘Transformations of Greek monstruous figures in contemporary Latin American literature and film; portrayals of female figures in narco novels, feature films and telenovelas from Colombia, Mexico and Puerto Rico and their adaptations in the Global North; narrative and filmic responses to  the 1989 U.S. led 1989 invasion of Panama; forms of resisting cultural, social and religious repression against women in Ecuadorian fiction and film; memory writing from legacies of neglect in contemporary Spanish and Peruvian novels; the figure of the cyborg in contemporary Spanish American novels; baroque bodies in Post-Franco literature; portrayals of the female body in the literature about the feminicidios in Ciudad Juárez; imagination and the imaginary in the short stories by Colombian author Marvel Moreno and British writer Angela Carter; Spanish American experimental poetry; the concepts of consciousness and nothingness in the oeuvre of Venezuelan poet Hanni Ossott; and female detectives in contemporary Latin American fiction.