Ana Ugarte Fernández

Assistant Professor
Department: Comparative Literature
augarte@humnet.ucla.edu
Website
Keywords: Literature, Comparative Latin America, Cuba, Caribbean, Latinos in the US

Ana Ugarte is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, with a focus on modern and contemporary Latin American, Caribbean, and LatinX literature and culture. Working at the intersections of Health Humanities, Disability Studies, and critical approaches to science and medicine, her research examines how literature makes perceptible forms of embodied knowledge that unsettle established categories of health, illness, and bodily difference. She is particularly interested in histories and imaginaries of experimentation, debility, and exposure, as well as in the relationship between bodily perception and structures of scientific and political knowledge.Her research also explores Global LatinXness through the linguistic and cultural crossings among Latin America, the United States, and Spain.

Her first monograph, Interocepción insular: Lo patológico en la imaginación literaria del laboratorio Caribe (UNC Press), reads literature from Cuba and Puerto Rico alongside the intertwined histories of medical, scientific, environmental, and political experimentation that have shaped the Caribbean. The book develops “insular interoception” as a framework for understanding forms of embodied knowledge produced under conditions of sustained exposure.