Overview
Ian Erickson-Kery is a Ph.D Candidate in Spanish and Portuguese at Duke University. His dissertation, titled Contested Territories: The Aesthetics and Politics of Urban Design in Mexico and Brazil, 1963-88, examines points of contact among architects, filmmakers, and visual artists working in peripheral urban zones in the wake of modernist planning projects. Prior to coming to Duke, he earned his B.A. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University; worked at e-flux, a web journal and platform for contemporary art and theory located in New York; and participated in a year-long artistic research residency at Capacete, a cultural center in Rio de Janeiro. He has taught in both Spanish and Portuguese at Duke, and his pedagogical approach—applicable to courses on cinema, literature, and visual culture—lies at the junction of Latin American cultural studies and urban studies in the Global South. His research has been supported by the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Kenan Institute for Ethics, the Duke Brazil Initiative, a James B. Duke Fellowship, and the Visualizing Cities Lab, an Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Unbounded initiative at Duke.