Diego Bustos, International Studies Institute

Name:

Diego Bustos

Title:

Associated Director International Studies Institute

Department:

International Studies Institute

Describe your research in about 200 words.

My work examines how literature represents and helps produce middle-class identities, aspirations, anxieties, and forms of cultural authority across Latin America and the US–Mexico borderlands. Drawing on literary studies, history, economics, and archival research, I study narratives of social mobility, economic development, citizenship, debt, intimacy, labor, and education, with particular attention to Colombia, Brazil, and transnational hemispheric networks. My current research explores literature and the middle classes as a field of cultural and political inquiry, alongside projects on Pan-Americanism, reading practices, and the archive of Chilean scholar Eduardo Neale-Silva, the principal biographer of Colombian novelist José Eustasio Rivera. My work ultimately asks how literature participates in the production of social hierarchies, cultural authority, and competing visions of the Americas.

What’s the most interesting thing you have learned from a student?

Not from one student but from every single student: their fresh ideas, their inspiration to learn, and the ingenuity of their approaches to old problems and questions.