Jennifer Harford Vargas
Associate Professor of Literatures in English
on the Dorothy Nepper Marshall Professorship of Hispanic and Hispanic-American Studies
Co-Director of Latin American, Iberian, and Latina/o Studies,
Faculty Coordinator for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program
Jennifer Harford Vargas (PhD, Stanford University) is a literary scholar and cultural critic. She researches and teaches on Latinx cultural production, transnational American studies, comparative racial and ethnic studies, theories of the novel, speculative fiction, decolonial and anti-imperial imaginaries, cultural memory, narratives of undocumented migration, and testimonio forms in the Americas. She is the author of Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel (Oxford University Press, 2017) and the co-editor of Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination (Duke University Press, 2016). She co-edited a special issue on Re-Imagining U.S. Colombianidades for the journal Latino Studies and is currently co-editing a book on diasporic Colombianx studies. Her work has also appeared in journals and edited books such as MELUS; Callaloo; Symbolism; Border Cinema: Re-Imagining Identity through Aesthetics; Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for American Civic Space; and Latina/o Literature in the Classroom. She serves on the Board of Directors of Juntos, a community-led Latinx organization in South Philadelphia that fights for immigrant rights.