SURF Mentoring
Potential projects/topics: Natural Disasters and Photography. How can we visualize and locate in space the photographic representations of natural disasters? Can the archive of these catastrophic events be accessed within the framework of detailed digital maps? This project proposes the creation of an archival visual material about a seven natural disasters that occurred in the Americas in the 20th Century: the 1967 earthquake in Caracas and the Vargas Tragedy of 2001 (Venezuela); the 1985 Mexico City earthquake (Mexico), The 1985 Armero Tragedy (Colombia), the 2017 Hurricane Maria (Puerto Rico); the eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902 (Saint-Pierre, Martinique); and the 2010 Haiti earthquake (Port-au-Prince, Haiti).
Potential skills gained: Archival research. Systematization of archival materials. Visual Culture Methodologiues
Required qualifications: Spanish and/or French (reading). Good organizational skills.
Direct mentor: Faculty/P.I.
Research Areas
Luis Duno-Gottberg specializes in Latin American and Caribbean culture from the nineteenth century to the present, with a particular emphasis on race and ethnicity, politics, and violence. His current book project, Dangerous People: Hegemony, Representation and Culture in Contemporary Venezuela, explores the relationship between popular mobilization, radical politics and political representation in Venezuela, while his pevious and ongoing work on “carceral communities” explores the daily life of prison communities, from Venezuela and Brazil to the Dominican Republic, as a specific bio-political order that also affects the wider civil society across Latin America. Additionally, Duno-Gottberg works on cinema in Venezuela and on the Haitian Revolution, and he also translated the first Haitian novel, Stella, from French first into English (2014) and then into Spanish (2016). He is regularly interviewed by newspapers from El Correo del Orinico in Venezuela to the Houston Chronicle, and he has also appeared on Univisíon.
