Hernán Matzkevich

His research examines the discourses through which cultural and religious difference are constructed and mobilized to dehumanize populations. While much of his work focuses on Judeo-Hispanic literature and the border-crossing identities of exiled Jewish-Hispanic authors, his scholarship combines historical and comparative analysis across disciplines such as literature, science, and manuscript culture to trace these dynamics from the Early Modern period to the present.

His book manuscript, Judeo-Hispanic Narratives in Exile, examines Early Modern constructions of selfhood, focusing on the role of disease in antisemitic discourse as a tool for producing Jewish otherness—often through mechanisms comparable to those used against Indigenous populations in the Americas. It shows how Jewish authors appropriated and reversed this rhetoric as a strategy of resistance and self-affirmation. The project reconstructs an understudied network of Sephardic authors, many still in manuscript form, through an interdisciplinary framework bridging Jewish and Hispanic Studies. Through the study of a range of Jewish authors, Matzkevich examines the convergence of Peninsular, colonial Latin American, and Jewish intellectual traditions, tracing their trajectories from Iberia to the Netherlands and their engagement with transatlantic and Mediterranean networks. This work offers insight into the roots of modern prejudice and challenges models of the Hispanic canon based solely on imperial expansion.

His current second book project examines the processes through which populations are dehumanized, rendering the oppression, torture, and even physical extermination of targeted groups morally acceptable within dominant frameworks. It draws on Peninsular and Latin American sources from the Early Modern period and nineteenth-century discourses of nation-building, national consciousness, and scientific racism, as well as contemporary Latin American dystopian, Neo-Gothic, and horror literature, to analyze how discourses of exclusion are constructed and transformed across time.