Gwendolen Pare

Gwendolen Pare (PhD University of California-Irvine, 2024) is a scholar of Latin American and Caribbean culture and critical theory. Her dissertation book project, Care Beyond Cure, brings Latin American and Afro-Caribbean poetry and literature in English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Creole/Nation Language into dialogue to show how dissident, contagious, and even violent forms of care emerge in the absence of cure. Important scholars have shown that the baroque ethos distinguishes a Latin American alternative modernity—but what happens if we look at what care emerges from and in baroque literature.

Collaborative work has been important for Pare's formation. Among other collaborations, in 2020 Pare received the UCHRI collaborative research award for the project, Performance in the Wake | Cuerpas ante lo político, in which hemispheric performances became interlocutors for the challenges the Humanities’ arguably face today. Together with collaborators Elena Cardona, Isabella Vergara, and Mell Rivera Díaz, she published this work in Liminalities.

As a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies department (2024-26), Pare teaches courses in feminist science studies, on women and femme folks in the arts and literature of the Américas. She is also working on her second research project on Viral Feminisms, in which she interrogates how viral media transform conventional understandings of gender and sexuality, and into how, vice versa, viral feminisms challenge universalist histories of media and technology from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Photo credit: Gabriel Osorio