Oct. 15, 2012 5:00 p.m.
Welles-Brown Room of Rush Rhees Library
Lecture by Lina Meruane, “Viral Voyages, or AIDS as an Epidemic of Globalization.”

An important aspect in the global AIDS crisis is the way it has been read and represented in post colonial terms in Latin America. As an epidemic of signification, AIDS metaphors produced early on in the U.S. were repeated, reappropriated, and critically examined by homosexual writers from the south. In this presentation, I will examine the conceptual framework that links globalization and epidemics and the historical bonds between homosexuality, foreignness and disease. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of audiovisual AIDS campaigns in Latin America.

Lina Meruane (Ph.D., NYU) is a Latin American fiction writer and scholar with an interest in 20th-Century Latin American Literature, Representations of Disease, Gender Studies & Feminisms, and Global & Local Debates in Latin American Literature. She teaches Latin American cultures in the Liberal Studies Program and writing workshops in Creative Writing in Spanish at New York University. Meruane has published a collection of short stories and four novels including Fruta Podrida (2007) and Sangre en el Ojo (2012). She is the recipient of the Anna Seghers Prize (Berlin, 2011) and has received fellowships from the Chilean Fondo de Desarrollo de las Artes, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.