Luis Martin-Cabrera

Director, Latin American Studies

Associate Professor of Literature

email: las-director@ucsd.edu or lmartincabrera@ucsd.edu
office: LASB 3

Professor Martin-Cabrera’s intellectual work has always revolved around the convoluted relation between culture and politics. Against the eternal eclipse of the humanities, Martín-Cabrera’s intellectual production has insisted in designating culture as a privileged terrain to interrogate politics as knowledge for and about the public and the common, and therefore as a discourse always crossed by power relations and desire.

The labor of rethinking the complex relations between culture and politics has yield different intellectual outcomes over the past years. Martin-Cabrera’s first book, Radical Justice: Spain and the Southern Cone beyond Market and State (2011) takes this task to the fields of memory studies, human rights, and transitional justice. The companion of this book is a digital oral history project called, The Spanish Civil War Memory Project . Oral history functions in Martin-Cabrera’s intellectual trajectory as the supplement of academic writing, a terrain to collect and reconstruct what was excluded from the written record and the historical archives. Accordingly, The Spanish Civil War Memory Project stores more than one hundred interviews with survivors of fascist violence in Spain.

Expanding his interest in oral history, culture and politics, Martín-Cabrera’s second book Insurgencias invisibles: resistencias y militancias en Estados Unidos ( Invisible Insurgencies: Resistances and Activism in the United States) (2015) combines oral histories of activists from the San Diego/Tijuana border with Latin American inspired chronicles of political protests about institutional racism, the privatization of the university, organized labor, LGTB movements, and the anti-war movement. Originally written in Spanish, the book was the product of series of interviews for the Spanish digital newspaper rebellion.org.   

In the past years, Martín-Cabrera’s work has evolved from its original interest in Psychoanalysis and Marxism to a more intersectional and anti-colonial analysis of cultural production. In turn, this shift reflects also a more intense dedication to the study of Latin America as a result, among other things, of his tenure as Director of UC-EAP (Education Abroad Programs) in Chile and Argentina (2013-2016).

Professor Martin-Cabrera is currently working in two research projects: The Transandean Lithium Project and a book on the formation of popular subjectivities during the last cycle of protests in Chile. Funded thru a Whiting Foundation Public Engagement Fellowship, the Transandean Lithium Project seeks to document the impact of lithium extraction in the indigenous communities of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile where 80% of the world lithium reserves are located. The second project, tentatively titled Ritmos de La Chimba: Movimientos sociales y subjetividad popular en el Chile Actual (2006-2013) is a more conventional cultural analysis of populism and popular culture in Chile.

Jessica Cassidy

Program Coordinator
Undergraduate and Graduate Advisor 

email: jlcassidy@ucsd.edu or las@ucsd.edu 
phone: (858) 534-7967
office: LASB 1

Coordinates logistics of program coordination, including graduate admission, outreach events, and graduation. Provides advising to the undergraduate population for the Latin American Studies major and minor course requirements; in addtion, advises graduate students on the Latin American Studies Master's Program including course requirements and thesis work.

Shanley Miller

Management Services Officer 

email: smiller@ucsd.edu
phone: (858) 534-4757
office: SSB 401

Manages program administrative functions including finance/budget, academic personnel, human resources, facilities, and staff supervision. 

Sarah Buck Kachaluba

Nara M. I. Franca

Student Outreach Coordinator

Email: nmunizimprotafranca@ucsd.edu

Brenda Guzman

Academic Personnel Specialist
Email: b1guzman@ucsd.edu

Manages the hiring process for LAS Lecturers