Valeria Coronel (FLACSO Ecuador) begins residency at Northwestern
February 3, 2025
Valeria Coronel (FLACSO Ecuador) residency at Northwestern
February 3, 2025
Andean Cultures & Histories and Latin American & Caribbean Studies, homed in the Weinberg College Center for International and Areas Studies at Northwestern University, are pleased to announce historian Valeria Coronel as the Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Winter and Spring quarters 2025.
Valeria Coronel is a senior research professor at FLACSO Ecuador in Quito. In the Department of Sociology and Gender Studies and the doctoral program in History at FLACSO, she has contributed to the formation of interdisciplinary academic areas at the juncture of Andean history, historical sociology, and Latin American critical theory. She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of History at New York University.
In her research, she has studied the Andean Baroque within the framework of critical theory examining Counter-Reformation religiosity and colonial mercantilism in the 17th century. Her recent publications have focused on the study of the 19th and 20th centuries, with particular emphasis on the politics and philosophy of democratic republicanism in the northern Andes. Her book, La última guerra del siglo de las luces, revolución liberal y republicanismo popular en Ecuador (2022), addresses the languages and strategies of popular power accumulation in the Radical Party and analyzes the revitalizations of democratic republicanism towards the configuration of political rights and the discourse on property in a radical republic. Her studies examine the tensions of democratic hegemony in a context of postcolonial nation formation in a historical cycle marked by the rise and crisis of the world market. Her studies include approaches to Latin American modernism and the avant-garde, critical traditions, and the plebeian public sphere. Her most recent publications delve into the political imagination and transformative capacity of the interwar left in Latin America.
Valeria Coronel has promoted interdisciplinary and international collaboration groups for the study of the contemporary global crisis with a focus on authoritarian and democratic transitions in the present. She is a founding member of “Red crítica populismo, republicanismo y crisis global.” She was a Senior Fellow based at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico (2021) where she co-directed the interdisciplinary project “Regulation and Deregulation of Wealth in Latin America” under the auspices of the Maria Sybila Merian Center for Advanced Studies (CALAS) supported by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
As part of her work at Northwestern University, she will teach a graduate seminar titled "Crisis, Contentious Politics, and Critical Thought in Latin America" in Winter 2025. In February, she will participate in "A Conversation on Humanities in the Public/Cultural Sphere" at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, discussing her work as an academic who has ventured into what she proposes as a postcolonial public policy in her former role as Metropolitan Secretary of Culture of Quito 2023-2024. In the Spring quarter, she will participate in the conference Thinking Andean Studies, present a lecture on her latest book, Lo Nacional Popular en Ecuador y la Izquierda de Entreguerras (FCE 2025), and present her current project. During her stay, Professor Coronel will conduct archival research in Chicago on the formation of area studies and the impact of cultural relativism in the early Cold War period. She will also engage undergraduate and graduate students across Latin American studies at Northwestern. Finally, Professor Coronel will explore possibilities for future, sustained academic and research collaborations between Northwestern and FLACSO Ecuador.