Lucille Kerr
Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, (Ph.D. Yale University)
Office: Crowe Hall 1-141
Phone: 847-467-6698
E-mail: lckerr@northwestern.edu
Lucille Kerr‘s areas of specialization include twentieth-century Latin American literature, with emphasis on
narrative fiction, the Boom and post-Boom eras, literary culture since the mid-twentieth century, literary
theory, and, more recently, Latin American Jewish literature and culture, especially in the Southern Cone.
She is affiliated with the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, the Jewish Studies Program, and
is among the Associated Faculty of the Program in Comparative Literary Studies. Her publications include
Suspended Fictions: Reading Novels by Manuel Puig (U of Illinois P) and Reclaiming the Author: Figures
and Fictions from Spanish America (Duke UP). Her ongoing projects include a collective volume about the
Boom era and a web-based Latin American literature-film archive. Her current research draws on recent
participation in an NEH seminar on “Jewish Buenos Aires” and deals with Argentine Jewish narrative and
film in relation to prevailing Boom and post-Boom currents. Her research has been supported by grants
from the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science
Research Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She served as Chair of the Department
of Spanish and Portuguese in 1999-2002 and 2003-2006.
With the support of the Sava Ranisavljevic Endowment in WCAS, she is heading up a project to develop teaching and research on Latin American Jewish topics at Northwestern. The project includes new courses in the field, enhancement of library holdings, and visits by distinguished Latin American Jewish figures. In 2008-09, Marjorie Agosín (Chilean writer & human rights activist) Edna Aizenberg (scholar), Ana María Shua (Argentine writer), and Saúl Sosnowski (scholar) came to Northwestern; in 2009-10, the program’s visitors will include Ruth Behar (scholar, filmmaker, poet) and Erin Graff Zivin (scholar).
Jewish Studies Courses
Spanish 397 Discovering Jewish Latin America: From Jewish Gauchos to Cosmopolitan
Culture in Argentina
Spanish 105 Exploring Jewish Argentina, Freshman Seminar
