Beatriz E. Balanta, PhD

Beatriz received a PhD in Latin American literature and culture from Duke University. As an undergraduate, she studied sociology at Boston College and became fascinated by how race, gender, class, and history combine to create people’s identities and national cultures. Beatriz is an alumna of SIT; in 1998 she enrolled in the African Arts and Culture program in Accra, Ghana, where she conducted research on women writers. She is a child of the diaspora, born in Puerto Tejada (Cauca), Colombia, and emigrating to Boston as a teenager. This radical change in geographic and social coordinates plus extensive travel throughout South America, Europe, and West Africa have taught her that reality is a hodgepodge of local colors and idiosyncrasies tied together by socio-economic and historical strands that expand beyond the homegrown. Beatriz’s scholarly interests are broad. She is currently working on a book manuscript about portraiture, abolitionist literature, and black radical politics in nineteenth-century Brazil. She has published essays about abduction and colonial hauntings, the colonial dreams and failed projects of confederate Southerners in Brazil, and the visual representation of the black body in Colombia. With a group of feminist scholars, artists, and activists, she is co-editing a series of artistic pamphlets on the intricate connections of sexism, gender violence, and war in Latin America. She has taught courses on race and war in the Americas, the meaning of freedom, post-colonial and feminist theory, and gender and visual culture. Beatriz’s academic interests intersect with peace studies.

Education

• PhD, Duke University