Héctor Hoyos

Héctor Hoyos works at the intersection of literary criticism and continental philosophy. His scholarly publications include two monographs with Columbia University Press: Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel (2015), on ideological critiques of globalization in the Latin American novel, and Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America (2019), on the articulation of critical theory and new materialism in the region’s cultural production. The first of these studies appeared in Spanish translation as Los Aleph: Bolaño y la novela global latinoamericana, Crítica, 2020. (For Stanford Report coverage, see here.) He is a former Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin.

Hoyos has edited or co-edited article collections for Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, on contemporaneity, in 2014; for Cuadernos de literatura, on material culture, in 2016; for the Nueva América book series at the University of Pittsburgh press, on subjectivity; and for Revista Chilena de Literatura, on the twentieth anniversary of Roberto Bolaño's passing, both in 2023. Articles by Hoyos have appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, Third Text, Chasqui, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Law and Literature, Revista Hispánica Moderna, and Revista Iberoamericana, among others. He is preparing a co-authored manuscript entitled García Márquez and the Critique of Law: Rule of Affect as Constitutive Power in World Literature.

Professor Hoyos welcomes graduate applicants in all fields of modern Latin American literature and culture, from the 19th century to the present. Dialogues across national traditions are preferred. Primary subfields are the Southern Cone and Colombia; secondary include Cuba and Brazil. Current topics of interest include: contemporaneity; post-anthropocentrisms; globalization and World Literature; fictionalizations of human rights and juridical reasoning. For multidisciplinary projects, see Modern Thought and Literature.

Presently, Hoyos co-chairs the research groups materia, on Latin Americanist and comparative anthropodecentric thought, and Law and Literature in the Global South. He also directs the Center for Latin American Studies and the Center for the Study of the Novel. His radio interview on Bolaño, hosted by Robert Harrison on Entitled Opinions, can be listened here. A 2014 invited lecture can be viewed here; a 2018 lecture here. See also Public Books and Growing Up in Macondo.