Associate Professor of Spanish, Latina/o and Latin American Studies; Associate Professor of Gender Studies
(leave fall 2011)
Office Hours: T/TH: 10-11 & by appt.
Christian Gundermann received his Ph.D. in Spanish from Rutgers University in 2002 (and previously in German and Latin American Studies from Cornell University in 1999). He is committed to the teaching of language, aesthetics, history, and politics as a form of cultural resistance in a world that seems to have run out of time. In fact, time and space (and how they have changed culturally over the last century or so) are central coordinates in his work on film and literature. Specifically, Gundermann's research explores the resurgence of left-wing politics in Argentine culture during the post-dictatorship period (1983 to the present) based on a model of melancholic identification with the "disappeared" relatives and friends. He is also interested the annihilation of the public sphere in Argentina in the 1970s both in relation to its specific national context, and in dialogue with similar experiences throughout Latin America and within the context of the global conservative "revolution" of the last three decades (commonly termed "globalization"). In both his research and his teaching, Gundermann is equally interested in the specifics of particular historical situations and their broader regional and global contexts.