José Carlos Díaz Zanelli is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Hamilton College. He specializes in Latin American literature and culture, with an emphasis on Indigenous Studies and Environmental Humanities, approached through the lenses of decolonial critique, political economy, and ecocriticism. He holds a PhD in Latin American Literature and Culture from Rutgers University (2022). Previously, he was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania (2023-24) and a visiting assistant professor of Spanish at Trinity College (2022-23).

His manuscript, Insurgent Veins: Indigenismo, Indigenous Literatures, and Decolonial Cracks (forthcoming, University of Pittsburgh Press), explores the formation of Indigenous decolonial discourse in the Andes and Mesoamerica throughout the twentieth century, along with the anticolonial postulates that inspire the Latin American indigenista canon. He is also co-editor of Worlding Latin America: Cosmopolitanism, Planetarity, and Global Networks (forthcoming, De Gruyter). His scholarship has been published in Comparative Literature Studies, Modern Language Notes, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas, Letras, América Crítica, and Transmodernity.

In addition to his academic career, he was a political journalist in Peru for six years, working for the newspapers La República and Perú21. He also worked for seven years at the environmental and pro-Indigenous NGO Servindi, where he conducted research and promoted civil impact projects in favor of Indigenous communities in the Andes and Amazonia.

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