Alejandro Castro

Assistant Professor
Department: Spanish and Portuguese
castroalejandro@ucla.edu
Website
Keywords: Latin America, Brazil, Literature, Venezuela, Caribbean, Latinos in the US

Alejandro Castro is a writer and scholar whose work moves between U.S. Latino, Caribbean, and Latin American cultures, with critical interventions grounded in biopolitics, queerness, migration, literary theory, and psychoanalysis. He earned his Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese from New York University, where he also taught courses on Latin American literature and culture. He has also taught at Williams College and at the Central University of Venezuela.

He co-edited Radical Disobedience, a volume on Venezuelan performance and politics published by HemiPress. His academic research has been supported by fellowships and awards including the NYU Dean’s Outstanding Dissertation Award, the MacCracken Fellowship, the NYU Migration Network Award, the Tinker Field Research Grant, the Penfield Fellowship, and the Alpine Fellowship.

Also a poet, Castro is the author of three poetry collections: Parasitarias (2020); El lejano oeste (2013), which received the Venezuelan Booksellers Association’s Book of the Year Award; and No es por vicio ni por fornicio. Uranismo y otras parafilias (2011), winner of Monte Ávila Editores’ prize for emerging authors. His nonfiction has appeared in Papel Literario, the literary supplement of El Nacional, and in a range of digital media outlets.