Eric Prieto
· Professor of FrenchVerifiedUniversity of California, Santa Barbara · Comparative Literature
Active 1990–2026
About
Eric Prieto is the French and Italian Chair of Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center for Literary Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is involved in the academic community at UC Santa Barbara, contributing to the Comparative Literature Program within the College of Letters and Science. As a faculty member, he engages in research and teaching related to comparative literature, with a focus on French and Italian literary studies. His professional contact information includes his email (prieto@frit.ucsb.edu) and his professional webpage (http://www.frit.ucsb.edu/people/eric-prieto).
Research topics
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Linguistics
- Geography
- Physics
- Economics
- Law
- Philosophy
- Astronomy
- Art
- Economic growth
- Archaeology
- Theoretical physics
- Astrophysics
- Aesthetics
Selected publications
Informal Urbanism and/as Representational Crisis
2026-01-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingUrban Informality and Narrative Form
2026-01-23
book1st authorCorrespondingUrban Informality and Narrative Form brings together literary analysis and spatial planning theory in an interdisciplinary study of urban informality. It examines a diverse array of literary and cinematic fictions from across the globe—West and North Africa, West and South Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America—in dialogue with influential social scientific studies of urban informality. Leading scholar Eric Prieto explores the formal and representational strategies authors have used to address the realities of life in the informal city. He demonstrates the ability of literary texts to provide significant insights into the kinds of real-world concerns that preoccupy planning and policy specialists but that have remained resistant to the more traditional methodologies of urban studies and planning. The book sheds new light on the forces that have led to the prevalence of urban informality in the Global South, while also debunking some common misconceptions about the phenomenon, highlighting the great diversity of subjective experiences hidden behind the euphemistic “informal settlement” (or the more pejorative “slum”), and identifying some of the most promising ways forward for the urban poor. At a time when over half of all city dwellers in the Global South live in an informal settlement of some kind, the urgency of the topic could not be clearer. With its global breadth and novel methodology (using urban theory as literary theory), this book will be of interest to scholars of urban literature, postcolonial and world literature, and to social scientists working in the spatial planning and policy fields.
2026-01-23
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2026-01-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingHybrid Urbanization and Literary Space
2026-01-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingMemorializing People as Infrastructure in Abidjan and Dakar (Rouch, Sembène, Mambéty)
2026-01-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingLiterary Mappings of the Informal City
2026-01-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingChanging Paradigms in Urban Studies
2026-01-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingA New Generation of Urban Informalists
2026-01-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingLiterary urban studies · 2025-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 67 shared
T. Maciaszek
Centre National d'Études Spatiales
- 56 shared
Christophe Fabron
- 56 shared
Tony Pamplona
- 53 shared
A. Costille
- 52 shared
R. Massey
- 51 shared
Franck Ducret
- 48 shared
Alexandre Réfrégier
- 48 shared
Laurent Martin
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