Marcelo Carosi, Ph.D. is a visiting assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of Hispanic Studies Studies at Hamilton College, where he won the 2020 Sidney Wertimer Award for Excellence in Advising and Mentorship. Marcelo has written and lectured on Latin American culture, including visual and literary representations of care in relation to black femininity/masculinity, transsexuality, neoliberalism, and reproductive labor.
Marcelo is the managing editor of the literary magazine Encuentros and the head investigator of Bambalinas, a digital archive on Latin American street theatre. He received his PhD in Spanish from New York University in 2019 where he won the 2018 Outstanding Teaching Award, among several other awards and fellowships. His work appears or is forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals and anthologies.
Research
Working at the forefront of Latin American gender studies, my research examines contemporary cultural production on care. My dissertation Dangerous Maids: The Politics of Care in Neoliberal Latin America traces unexpected affinities between the figure of the maid and the crisis of care exacerbated by neoliberal policies. Focusing on cinema and literary fiction across the Americas, my project illuminates how reciprocity, attentiveness, mourning, and desire, reshape the present despite vapid consumption, state terror, forced migration, and environmental catastrophes. Under these contexts, Dangerous Maids analyzes survival strategies when care becomes both a sign and a fix to the social crisis as seen in the cultural production in the region.
My second project offers a critical survey of contemporary representations of fatherhood. It argues that popular representations of paternal authority have become increasingly important to the cultural legitimization of male power given neoliberal politics and the resulting dispossession of large sections of the population. It analyses male care at a time when the traditional conception of the family has been challenged by a number of factors, such as chronic unemployment, forced migration, the environmental crisis, and the illicit drug trade.
Teaching
In my classes, knowledge is built on empathy and inclusion, creating ways to relate the classroom to other spaces of learning such as museums, the street, or the home. In the last eight years, I have taught and designed elementary, intermediate, and advanced Spanish classes, in addition to literature and cultural content classes in both English and Spanish, where I give special emphasis to multiple perspectives and histories so as to make visible the underlying implications of knowledge and language formation, thereby exposing students to the importance of successfully engaging in a diverse society.
My courses have won multiple development grants that appreciate my approaches to connecting creativity, aesthetic discernment, and disciplinary practice with social and cultural engagement. I consider that fostering ethical and informed citizenship is key to inviting students to question established structures, such as gender or racial hierarchies that they may have a role in upholding. This is why I incorporate the theory and practice of social change into my classes by using the lens of engaged scholarship and social innovation.
Mentoring
In addition to working within my own field, I have sought to foster exchange with students in other departments. At Hamilton I organized, among other events, the “Latin American Short-Film Festival” and, while at NYU, I co-organized, with Africana Studies and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the successful conference “#Black Lives Matter in Latin America.” I have also regularly participated in NYU’s mentorship program, where I give academic advice and support to a group of underrepresented M.A. and Ph.D. students across different colleges, discussing with them their concerns as students of color.
Also, In view of the current refuge crisis, I worked closely with students who were interested in declaring a Spanish major at Hamilton, serving as a mentor to help them design a research project on the refugee community in Utica that would expand their perspective in the field. By assessing interviews they conducted in the refugee center, I led students to combine their language skills with the process of learning about the immigrant experience through their interactions and this way contextualize how gender, race, ethnicity, labor, sexuality come together in the construction of (non)citizenship.