Juan Leal Ugalde

Juan Leal-Ugalde is a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish) at the University of Michigan. He defended a dissertation entitled The Enigma of Time and History: Images of Death in Revolutions and Armed Conflicts of the Twentieth Century in Mexico and Central America. Connecting photography and literature, his dissertation analyzes the historical violence of modern revolutions and their political and social consequences in present times. Juan Leal-Ugalde has a background in Continental philosophy, particularly aesthetics and critical theory. His research also includes Chilean poetry, Andean photography, Latin American visual culture, and films. He participated in multidisciplinary projects on indigenous photography in Chile, such as the publication of the books Andinos: Visualidades e imaginarios del desierto y el altiplano, y Memoria visual e imaginarios: Fotografías de pueblos originarios de los siglos XIX -XXI.  Among his teaching activities, he has taught classes on Latin American and Spanish literature, art, film, and photography, focusing on the representation of crucial historical events such as the Mexican Revolution, the Central American civil wars, and the Southern Cone dictatorships, among others.