Experimental Humanities at Bard College, Contemporary Latinx Literature, Bard College Spanish Studies, LAIS
Experimental Author Giannina Braschi
Bard College Conversation with Giannina Braschi: Writing Beyond Dystopia
Monday, November 3, 2025
Join us for a Bard College event featuring Giannina Braschi—poet, novelist, essayist, and pioneer of Spanglish in literature. Professor Patricia López-Gay will be in dialogue with Braschi. In an age saturated by dystopian narratives that often reinforce the status quo, Braschi’s hybrid and radical work in Spanish, English, and Spanglish opens up new ways of thinking about identity, power, and the future. Her groundbreaking contributions have been widely recognized with numerous awards, and she is celebrated as one of the most influential voices in contemporary Latinx literature.
Experimental Humanities Syllabus
This dialogue is part of the A Cartography for the Future online speaking series, which engages with creative and critical practices that respond to the prevailing sense that we are witnessing the end of the world (as we know it.) From ecological collapse and pandemics to war and the breakdown of analog life, we ask how storytelling can move us beyond catastrophe, offering new imaginaries of feeling and forms of connection, survival, and renewal.
Conducted in Spanish. Organized by Professor López-Gay. Co-sponsored by Spanish Studies, and LAIS. Open to the Bard Spanish-speaking community. To RSVP and to access relevant reading materials for this event, please contact Prof. López-Gay at plopezga@bard.edu
Associate Professor of Spanish
Primary Academic Program: Foreign Languages, Cultures, and Literatures. Experimental Humanities
Academic Program Affiliation(s): Experimental Humanities, Latin American and Iberian Studies, Literature, Spanish Studies
Biography: Professor López-Gay specializes in contemporary Spanish literature, with a strong interest in photography and film, and comparative literature (Iberia, Brazil, France). Her research is concerned with fiction and testimony, translation and cultural studies, the relationship between word and image, theories of the archive, and contemporary life narration. She is the author of numerous articles in journals such as Anales de literatura española contemporánea, Hispania, Letral, and Romance Notes; has given conference presentations and guest lectures nationally and internationally; and has been awarded research fellowships and grants from the French and Spanish Ministries of Education, the Generalitat of Catalonia, the Camões Institute of Portugal, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her new book, True Fictions [Ficciones de verdad] (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2020), focuses on archive fever and autobiographical writing through traditional and digital media. Before joining the Bard faculty in 2013, she taught at New York University and the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Professor López-Gay is part of the international research group on autofiction based at the University of Alcalá de Henares in Madrid, Spain. In addition to her teaching and research, she is a member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language. Currently, she is the coordinator of Latin American and Iberian Studies at Bard. Experimental Humanities.
PhD, Spanish and Portuguese languages and literatures, New York University; joint PhD, comparative literature and translation studies (French and Spanish), University of Paris 7 and Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Experimental Literature Resources
- Aldama, Frederick Luis, and Tess O’Dwyer, editors. Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. Experimental Literature.
- Bray, Joe, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale, editors. The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Routledge, 2012. Experimental Literature.
- Cecire, Natalia. Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.
- Colby, Georgina. Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
- Di Leo, Jeffrey R., and Warren Motte, editors. Experimental Literature: A Collection of Statements. JHU Press, 2018.
- Hering, David. David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Experimental Literature.
- La Torre Lagares, Elidio. Hyperglossia and the Novel: The Production of (Non)Space. Routledge, 2025.
- Reed, Anthony. Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing. Johns Hopkins University Press / Yale Department of Black Studies, 2014. Experimental Literature.
- Tomasula, Steve, editor. Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Other Hybrid Writings as Contemporary Art. University of Alabama Press, 2022. ]
tags: Bard college experimental writing courses, contemporary Experimental humanities, Experimental literature syllabus, Contemporary experimental authors, American experimental fiction, experimental writing today