Professor Ericka Beckman will give a talk on her recent book Capital Fiction: The Literature of Latin America's Export Age (Minnesota 2013), which investigates the key role played by literature in imagining and interpreting the rapid transformations unleashed by Latin America’s first major wave of capitalist modernization between 1870 and 1930. Questioning the opposition between culture and economics in Latin America and elsewhere, Ericka Beckman shows that literature operated as a powerful form of political economy during this period.

Dr. Beckman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in 19th- and 20th- century Latin American literature and culture as well as Marxism and critical theory. Her research focuses primarily on narratives of capitalist modernity and modernization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America.

This event is presented by the College of Humanities' Department of Spanish and Portuguese and is free and open to the public.