Horacio Legrás
· Professor of SpanishVerifiedUniversity of California, Irvine · Hispanic Studies
Active 1995–2025
About
Horacio Legrás is a Professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of California, Irvine, with a Ph.D. from Duke University. His research interests encompass Latin American culture, psychoanalysis, philosophy, political theory, popular culture, and insurgency. His dissertation focused on the contribution of popular culture to the constitution of modern Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century. Legrás has held academic positions at Georgetown University, where he worked in the Spanish and Portuguese Department from 1999 to 2005, and has also held visiting positions at UCI and Johns Hopkins University. He has authored two books: 'Literature and Subjection. The Economy of Writing and Marginality in Latin America' (2008) and 'Culture and Revolution. Violence, Memory and the Making of Modern Mexico' (2017). He has recently completed a third manuscript titled 'Reality in Question,' which studies recurrent crises in the hegemonic notion of reality in twentieth-century Latin America, emphasizing the roles of race, indigenousness, and gender. Legrás regularly teaches courses on Latin American film and visual studies within a Latin American context and is working on a documentary about Argentine psychoanalyst Marie Langer. His scholarly work includes approximately 50 academic essays that articulate his theoretical interests with specific regions and cultural productions, ranging from film and theater to photography and social movements.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Geography
- Law
- Engineering
- Geology
- Psychoanalysis
- Visual arts
- Psychology
- Cartography
- Art
- Aesthetics
- Criminology
Selected publications
2025-05-08
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThis chapter examines the trajectory of psychoanalysis in Latin America. Departing from its origins as a localized discourse intertwined with hygienism, psychoanalysis gradually transformed into a robust discipline capable of interpreting diverse social phenomena. By scrutinizing pivotal moments in Brazil's early encounters with psychoanalysis and Mexico's exploration of desire during the 1930s to 1950s, the chapter shows the slow sedimentation of a psychoanalytic culture that reached maturity with the formation of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association in 1942. The text explores the fruitful encounter between psychoanalysis and socio-political modernization, especially in the context of the Cold War. Through an analysis of the impasses between politics and psychoanalysis, the study elucidates the reasons behind the Lacanian vogue in the 1980s, while also attending to the complex relationships that psychoanalytic discourse weaves with neo-liberal governmentality and its conflictive relationship with other emancipatory discourses, prominent among them those of feminism and transgender studies.
CULTURAL ANTAGONISM AND THE CRISIS OF REALITY IN LATIN AMERICA
2022
1st authorCorrespondingFor most of the 20th century, Latin American literature and art have contested political and cultural projects of homogenization of a manifestly diverse continent. Reality in Question explores literary and humanist experimentations and questions of gender, race, and ethnicity as well as the contradictions of capitalist development that belie such homogenization by reconfiguring the sense of the real in Latin America. Covering four key geographical areas, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America and the Andes, every chapter delves into a question that has been central to the humanities in the last 20 years: Indigenous world-views, gender, race, neo-liberalism and visual culture. Legrás illuminates these issues with a thorough consideration of the theoretical questions inherent to how new identities disrupt the imaginary stability of social formations.
The Mexican Revolution and the Plastic Arts
2022-05-23 · 1 citations
other1st authorCorrespondingBLACKNESS, POSTSLAVERY, AND WHAT NEVER CEASES NOT TO WRITE ITSELF
Anthem Press eBooks · 2022-06-14 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingFeminicides, Psychoanalysis, and the Status of Social Desire in Our Time
Routledge eBooks · 2022
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Political Science
- Sociology
This chapter examines the feminicide violence of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, from a Lacanian perspective. In Ciudad Juárez, the inability of state agencies (police, juridical system, and social workers) to address feminicide’s causes and dynamics has led to remedial actions in the sphere of social activism, such as art exhibits, demonstrations, poems, plays, documentaries, and actions memorializing the often-anonymous victims. While none of these actions invoke a psychoanalytic language in their self-description, they can all be apprehended in terms of a basic psychoanalytic insight that characterized the early work of Jacques Lacan, for whom the Symbolic dimension is the only dimension that cures. Drawing from Lacanian psychoanalysis, the chapter examines the intersection of jouissance and consumer capitalism. The essay argues that this intersection allows us to see the crimes of Juárez not in terms of exceptionality, but rather as a piece in the global assemblage of capitalist accumulation.
Routledge eBooks · 2022
1st authorCorresponding- Geology
- Engineering
“Formations of sense” refers to the articulation between aesthetic production and social discourses (and practices) that inaugurate or suggest a new path for the social and aesthetic imagination of a country, a region, or a place. These formations allow contents, ideas, strategies to pass from one region, one time, one point of enunciation into another. These formations are multiple and contingent. In this essay, I offer instantiations of this mechanism covering the modern period in Latin America up to the beginning of the twenty-first century. They include the role of early popular theater in Argentina and Mexico, the historical condensation of the problem of a Latin American subject in the 1920s, the role of the archive in the construction of popular agency (Miguel Angel Asturias and Horacio Castellanos Moya), the extimate nature of the subject of race in modern Cuba (Lydia Cabrera, Alejo Carpentier, and Fernando Ortiz), the function of photography in the constitution of a discourse about social death (Sara Facio and Paz Erázurriz), and the junction of performance, protest, and feminism in recent Latin American social and aesthetic movements.
New frameworks: collaborative and indigenous media activism
Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · 2018-01-01 · 1 citations
articleSenior authorThe Wings of Carlos Colombino: Architect, Artist, Writer (an Interview)
Memory politics and transitional justice · 2017-09-20
book-chapterSenior author2017-09-11 · 1 citations
book-chapterSenior authorLatin American film studies has constituted itself as a field primarily through the analysis of film as an art form and as an industrial practice. Aesthetic and industrial analyses have been the principle critical approaches: the former taking aim at the workings of film form, the latter at the changing structures and dynamics of filmmaking practices. This chapter explores the scope of Latin American film studies by accounting for film/video's interface with other media, from community radio, to television, to digital technologies. It also helps us to reassess film history in the region by utilizing the discussion of contemporary indigenous and collaborative media activism to help us reassess the relationship between film and political militancy— an interface long defined by the New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. The chapter reviews some of the enormous variety of collaborative activist film- and video-making emerging with the advent of digital recording and editing possibilities.
University of Texas Press eBooks · 2017-12-31
paratext1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 2 shared
Freya Schiwy
- 1 shared
Dan Klooster
- 1 shared
Christina Solomon-Godeau
University of California System
- 1 shared
M Salas Ramirez
Klinik und Poliklinik für Nuklearmedizin
- 1 shared
Michael J. Schreffler
Pennsylvania State University
- 1 shared
Andrea Noble
University of California System
- 1 shared
David Lloyd
National Humanities Center
- 1 shared
Estado Etico
Education
Ph.D., Romance Studies
Duke University
- Resume-aware match score
- Save to shortlist
- AI-drafted outreach
See your match with Horacio Legrás
PhdFit ranks faculty by your research interests, methods, and publications — grounded in their actual work, not templates.
- Free to start
- No credit card
- 30-second signup