As we begin the semester, we're highlighting Bryn Mawr's newest faculty members. The College supports faculty excellence in both research and teaching.
Assistant Professor of Spanish Juan Su谩rez Ontaneda was born and raised in Quito, Ecuador.
"My upbringing largely informed my research curiosities at the intersection of culture, political systems, and ideologies," says Su谩rez Ontaneda. "Specifically, my research has analyzed how Latin American states produce discourses about race and how people respond to those discourses individually and collectively. How we think about culture informs how we think about citizenship and nation."
Su谩rez Ontaneda's current book manuscript, Palimpsests of Blackness in Latin America: The Performative Lives of Nascimento, Zapata Olivella, and Santa Cruz, examines how Afro-Latin American artists from Brazil, Colombia, and Peru used staged representations (writings, theater, sound recordings, choreographies, film) to challenge racism and discrimination in their respective countries from 1940-2000. By analyzing their staged representations, Su谩rez Ontaneda shows how these artists used their bodies to communicate messages of racial activism and, by doing so, how they created a vocabulary to protest racial injustices beyond the legal framework of the state.
In Su谩rez Ontaneda's second project, he examines the connection between sound systems, visual art, and the racialization of sound regulations in Caribbean Colombia and northeastern Brazil. His research on this topic has been published in Modern Languages Notes, Alambique, Perspectivas Afro, and in different edited volumes.
In 2014 he was the head of archival research for the documentary El Pan贸ptico Ciego (The Blind Panopticon) directed by Mateo Herrera. This documentary explored the remains of Ecuador鈥檚 oldest prison, Centro de rehabilitaci贸n social de varones No. 2, in Quito. He is currently working on a digital humanities project to make the archive's contents accessible to formerly incarcerated communities.
Su谩rez Ontaneda鈥檚 work in the classroom, like much of his research, is informed by his theatrical experiences. He has acted in plays in Ecuador, the U.S., Brazil, and Costa Rica, and likes to incorporate tools from the stage into his teaching.
"These tools help students gain confidence in acquiring a new language, or in understanding challenging theories about literature,鈥 he says. 鈥淏y bringing students鈥 histories, journeys, and experiences to the center of my lesson planning, my classroom functions as a laboratory for democracy and cultural dialogue."
Outside the classroom, you can find Su谩rez Ontaneda, "watching Liverpool games, on a stage working on community theatre, in some pool doing laps, or across town looking for fresh ingredients to cook Ecuadorian recipes."