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’s research focuses on cultural and literary representations of illness and corporeality. Her first monograph, Interocepción insular: lo patológico en la imaginación literaria del laboratorio Caribe (Insular Interoception: The Pathological in the Literary Imagination of the Caribbean Laboratory, UNC Press, 2025), reconceptualizes how the Hispanic Caribbean has served as a laboratory for scientific, economic, and political experimentation. Covering texts from the mid-twentieth century to the present, the book interrogates Caribbean biopolitics, somatic knowledge, and narrative power—specifically how disease and disability are imagined, recounted, and experienced within and beyond medical and colonial frameworks. Her work consistently engages questions of posthumanism, biopolitics, and embodiment theory, with a transdisciplinary approach that also encompasses Indigeneity and Transatlantic Latinx Studies.