Overview
Prof. Sánchez Prado's areas of research include Latin American literature from the 19th to the 21st century, film and media studies, food studies and cultural studies writ large, with a particular focus on modern Mexico. His work concerns the intersections between institutions, aesthetics and ideology, and draws from a wide range of methodologies ranging from the legacies of the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies and the Frankfurt School to Bourdieusian sociology and Latin American sociocriticism. In his writing, Prof. Sánchez Prado strives to build connections between archival materials, institutional history, and political theory, while exploring culture in its material and experiential dimensions.
He is the author of eight books, and over one hundred and thirty academic articles and chapters. His book Naciones intelectuales won the LASA Mexico 2010 Best Book in the Humanities Prize. His most recent volume, Taco, published by the Object Lessons series at Bloomsbury, has been the subject of over twenty presentations in universities, bookstores and public libraries across the United States as well as various media engagements. He is currently completing two books: Meditaciones Benjaminianas, a collection of essays on the materiality of culture, and Mexico City: A Writer’s City, a spatial study of Mexico City literature for the Cambridge University Press series Imagining Cities.
Prof. Sánchez Prado’s scholarly articles have appeared in a diversity of books and journals in the Americas, Europe and Asia. His essay “Endless Profileration of Signifiers,” a discussion of the state of the field in Mexican Studies,” was awarded the James Whilston Memorial Prize for Article of the Year at the Bulletin of Spanish Studies. Beyond the academy, he has been a contributor to media outlets in Mexico and the United States, including the Washington Post, Public Books, Words Without Borders, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Mexican newspapers El Universal and Milenio. He has been featured in St. Louis Public Radio, Al Jazeera, the BBC, Mexico’s Canal 22, and a diversity of podcasts and radio broadcasts.
Prof. Sánchez Prado has served as editor or co-editor of over twenty scholarly collections. , including Mexican Literature as World Literature (2021), which received honorable mentions in the International Latino Book Awards and the MLA Best Edited Collection Prize, and Teaching the Mexican Revolution, forthcoming in the Options for Teaching series at the Modern Language Association. Prof. Sánchez Prado is editor of the series Critical Mexican Studies at Vanderbilt University Press and co-editor, with Leslie Marsh, of the SUNY Press Series on Latin American Cinema, which have collectively published over forty books since 2020. He is part of the editorial teams in charge of the three-volume history of Mexican literature at Cambridge University Press and of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to the Novel.
Prof. Sánchez Prado’s scholarly articles have appeared in a diversity of academic books and journals in the Americas, Europe and Asia. His recent essay “Endless Profileration of Signifiers,” a discussion of the state of the field in Mexican Studies,” was awarded the James Whilston Memorial Prize for Article of the Year at the Bulletin of Spanish Studies. Beyond the academy, he has been a contributor to media outlets in Mexico and the United States, including the Washington Post, Public Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Words Without Borders, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Mexican newspapers El Universal and Milenio. He has been featured in St. Louis Public Radio, Al Jazeera, the BBC, Mexico’s Canal 22, and a diversity of podcasts and radio broadcasts.
Prof. Sánchez Prado has served in the executive council of the Modern Language Association, in which he has also been part of other committees. He is the former President of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and a current member of the board of the Society for Novel Studies. He has also served in the editorial boards of over twenty-five journals. He was appointed by the Librarian of Congress as the Chair of the Cultures of the South at the Kluge Center during the summer of 2021, conducting research towards his book on popular cosmopolitanism in Mexican cinema.
Research Focus
- Mexican cultural studies
- Latin American literature from the 19th to the 21st century
- Latin American and global cinema
- World Literature and World Culture
- Latin American intellectual history
- Sociology of culture
- Critical theory
- Food studies
Publications
Books
- Taco. Object Lessons Series. Bloomsbury, 2025.
- Intermitencias alfonsinas. Estudios y otros textos (2004-2018). Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 2019.
- Strategic Occidentalism. On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World Literature. Northwestern University Press, 2018.
- Screening Neoliberalism. Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988-2012. Vanderbilt University Press, 2014. Spanish edition: La proyección del neoliberalismo. Transformaciones del cine mexicano 1988-2012. Vanderbilt University Press, 2019.
- Intermitencias americanistas. Estudios y ensayos escogidos (2004-2010). Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2012.
- Naciones intelectuales. Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana (1917-1959). Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures 47. Purdue University Press, 2009.
- Poesía para nada. Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes/ Programa Editorial Tierra Adentro, 2005.
El canon y sus formas: la reinvención de Harold Bloom y sus lecturas hispanoamericanas. Secretaría de Cultura Puebla, 2002.
Selected edited collections
- Teaching the Mexican Revolution. Modern Language Association, 2026.
- With Gesine Müller. World Exhaustion in Latin American Literatures and Cultures / El agotamiento del mundo en las literaturas y culturas de América Latina. DeGruyter, 2025.
- With Anna M. Nogar and José Ramón Ruisánchez. A History of Mexican Literature; A History of Mexican Poetry; A History of the Mexican Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016-2027.
- Mexican Literature as World Literature. Bloomsbury, 2021.
- Pierre Bourdieu in Hispanic Literature and Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2018.
América Latina en la “literatura mundial”. Serie Biblioteca de América. Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. 2006.
Selected scholarly articles and chapters
- “On the Borders of Form. The Binational Aesthetics of Robin Myers and Violeta Orozco.” The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Latin American Poetry. Eds. Ben Bollig and Jorge J. Locane. London: Routledge, 2026. 69-81.
- “Endless Proliferations of Signifiers. Mexican Cultural Studies in the Future Tense.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 100.9-10 (2024): 1665-87.
- “A Critique of Provincial Reason. Situated Cosmopolitanisms and the Infrastructures of Theoretical Translation.” KNOW. A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 7.2 (2023): 171-183.
- “Cultural Capital. Reflections from a Latin Americanist.” Genre 56.1 (2023): 49-67.
- “Notas para un cine por-venir. Archivo, historia y despertar en el cine-ensayo contemporáneo.” Iluminaciones profanas. Lecturas latinoamericanas de y desde la obra de Walter Benjamin. Eds. Jaime Villarreal and Víctor Barrera Enderle. Mexico: Nómada/ Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León/ Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2023. 73-104.
- “The Utopian Essay.” The Cambridge Companion to the Essay. Eds. Kara Wittman and Evan Kindley. Cambridge University Press, 2023. 141-53.
- “Cantinflas and World Literature. Popular Cosmopolitanism and Comic Adaptation in Mid-Century Cinema.” Journal of World Literature 6 (2021): 331-46. Republished in The Artistic Object and Its Worlds. Literature and Cinema. Ed. Michael Wood and Delia Ungureanu. Brill, 2025. 87-102.
- “Commodifying Mexico. On American Dirt and the Cultural Politics of a Manufactured Bestseller.” American Literary History 33.2 (2021): 371-93.
- “The Persistence of the Transcultural. A Latin American theory of the Novel from the National-Popular to the Global.” New Literary History 51 (2020): 347-74.
- “Amores Perros. Exotic Violence and Neoliberal Fear”. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 15, 1 (2006): 39-57. Spanish version published in Casa de las Américas 240 (2005): 139-153. Republished in: Latin American Studies. A Reader. Eds. Jens Andermann, Benjamin Bollig et al. Routledge, 2017. 265-81.
