Description:

Natalie Lauren Belisle is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at the University of Southern California, where her research and teaching focus on contemporary Caribbean literature, aesthetics, and thought, and ecologies of race in Latin America. Her first book Caribbean Inhospitality: The Poetics of Strangers at Home was published in February 2025 with Rutgers University Press.  She has also published essays in Small Axe, Interventions, Diacritics, and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. She is currently working on a two parallel book projects: one reads forms of rhythmic movements practices that undo the normative modes of becoming a person, a human, and a citizen, among other socially and politically legitimate categories; another investigates the question of Black existence in Latin America and Latin Americanist criticism as an epistemological problem that challenges and expands the purely ontological readings of Black negativity.