When: Wednesday, November 12, 4:30 PM
Location: Rolfe Hall 4302 – Lydeen Library

Interocepción insular (UNC Press, 2025) examines literary representations of disease and disability to reconceptualize the Hispanic Caribbean as a site of scientific, economic, and political experimentation. Exploring how individuals subjected to various forms of testing—eugenic, medical, neoliberal, or otherwise—hyper-monitor a corporeality that is at once their own and alien. By theorizing the “Caribbean laboratory” as distinct from the concentration camp or the plantation, Ugarte investigates how test subjects apprehend their own bodies within ongoing regimes of experimentation, while discussing how disease and disability are imagined, recounted, and experienced inside and outside medical and colonial diagnoses.

Ana Ugarte (Ph.D., Duke U) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA. Both a scholar of Health Humanities, with a focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American fiction and cultural production, as well as global Latinx studies. Ugarte’s work has appeared in journals including Cultural Dynamics, Journal for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Voces del Caribe.