Julia A. Kushigian

Julia Kushigian’s research focuses on the intersection of culture and the representation of peripheries in twentieth and twenty-first century Latin America. Her scholarship engages transborderism, addressing geographic experiments in narrative and poetry from Middle Eastern- and Asian-Latin American and Hispanic Studies, to genre-bending practices that destabilize and unsettle traditionally held literary and cultural studies theories of the binary. Her wide-ranging interests in literature, art and cultural studies; Indigenous and racial ecologies and poetics; decolonial thinking; and feminist aesthetics pay attention to the renovative qualities of literary figures regardless of historical moment, political branding, sexuality or positionality.

Kushigian is the author of Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition. In Dialogue with Borges, Paz and Sarduy (University of New Mexico Press, 1991), Reconstructing Childhood. Strategies of Reading for Culture and Gender in the Spanish-American Bildungsroman (Bucknell University Press, 2003), Crónicas orientalistas y autorrealizadas: Entrevistas con Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, Elena Poniatowska, Severo Sarduy y Mario Vargas Llosa (Verbum, 2016) and The Resilient Apocalypse. Narrating the End from Early Spanish Visualizations to Twenty-First Century Latin American Articulations (University of North Carolina Press, 2024). She has contributed ecofeminist and ecocritical book chapters to two collections of essays on Ibero-American ecocritical literary theory, and published numerous scholarly articles on revered Latin American authors including Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Rodolfo Usigli, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Jorges Luis Borges, Silvina Bullrich, Augusto Roa Bastos, Laura Restrepo, Diamela Eltit and Elicura Chihaulaf. In addition, she edited a collection of essays titled International Studies in the Next Millennium. Meeting the Challenge of Globalization (Praeger, 1998), the selected proceedings from an international symposium she chaired, “The Future of International Studies in the Liberal Arts Context,” with support from the Hewlett Foundation, Connecticut College, 1996.

Her most recent work, The Resilient Apocalypse. Narrating the End from Early Spanish Visualizations to Twenty-First Century Latin American Articulations, questions the fixity of the apocalyptic “end of the world as we know it.” It looks at the Apocalypse of rival traditions as a device to instruct in ways to confront and order chaotic aspects of the cosmos. From eleventh-century gilded biblical illustrations, to religious betrayal, anti-slavery exposure, and racial and gender-based violence spanning film and narrative, the Apocalypse’s epistemic power resides in the ability to identify those spaces and spell out those cultural practices that link the politics of envisioning the End (mourning) to a cohesive poetics of addressing, managing and transforming its power in relation to others (resistance). Competing apocalyptic worldviews internalize other positionalities in order to arrive at sustainable plans of action and social goals supported by those traces the other leaves behind or imprints on the rival’s cultural ethos. Providing a mirror into society’s innate fears, beliefs and aspirations, the Apocalypse, Kushigian argues, obliges us to look not at the End point but at what produces the tension between finality and becoming.

Kushigian’s most recent grant funded her project “The Eradication of Gender-based Violence,” as a Fulbright Specialist, Ecuador 2023-24, (September and October planning sessions; November and December on site workshops, talks, panels, and keynote addresses; January-June consulting on grant proposals for future UDA workshops in Indigenous communities, preparing videos from Connecticut College for the International Relations Office at UDA in support of ACE review, Washington, and ongoing advising/consulting on a doctoral thesis in the Psychology department at UDA, “Enfoque de Género en el Currículo Universitario de las Carreras de Comunicación y Periodismo de la Ciudad de Cuenca”). Kushigian’s work in Ecuador coincided with that of the Universidad del Azuay (Cuenca), Fulbright Ecuador (Quito) and the Consejo Superior de Educación (Quito), which highlighted the United Nations’ annual campaign, “No to Gender-based Violence,” November and December.

Kushigian’s leadership roles outside of Connecticut College include serving as President of NECLAS (New England Council of Latin American Studies); Chair, Ethics Commission, Waterford; District 2 RTM Member, Waterford; Board President, Hispanic Alliance of Southeastern Connecticut, President, New London Rotary Club; Chair, International Service Committee, NLRC; Corporator, L&M Hospital, New London; Board Member, Waterford Education Foundation; Justice of the Peace, Waterford.

Other Recent Courses:

• CC/SDP Spa 221 Introduction to Hispanic Identities: Latin America, Latinos in the US, Spain
• Business Spanish: A Cultural Approach
• Environmental Justice in Latin America and Spain
• Spa 325/425 Teaching and Learning Spanish: Foreign Language Methodology, Applied Linguistics and SLA

Advisor:

• Hispanic Studies & Latin American and Latino Studies majors, minors
• Social Justice & Sustainability Pathway students
• Rotary International Peace Scholarships
• Past Director, CISLA; Past Associate Director, Holleran Center

View the Hispanic Studies department website.

Majoring in Hispanic Studies.

Majoring in Latin American Studies.

"In a traditional reading of the novel of growth and development - or Bildungsroman - a white, male, middle-class individual emerges as protagonist. Kushigian's bold, interdisciplinary study offers new approaches to the Bildungsroman and ably demonstrates that its design is anything but monolithic. Expanding the definition beyond the limitations imposed by the traditional form, Kushigian (Connecticut College) brings to the discussion the experiences of women, the marginalized, and the disenfranchised. Two premises underscore her analysis: The individual identity often appears problematic and inextricably intertwined with national and cultural identity, and that the path to self-knowledge leads to engagement with the Other. The novel of self-realization and actualization thus becomes a type of hero journey marked by an exploration of gender roles and socioeconomic difference. Kushigian examines myriad cultural components present in both canonical and less-studied texts and employs four basic reading strategies: the standard view of Bildungsroman as rite of passage, new models of wholeness or self-actualization, a redefinition of the concept of the heroic, and ambiguity and hybridization of identity through parody and pastiche. Including ample documentation and bibliography, this major study will change the way scholars view the coming-of-age novel." -- Choice

"You may be interested to know that I am currently doing an internship at the Association for Moroccan Immigrants and Workers in Spain. I have the opportunity to do a study on the integration of the Moroccan immigrant woman into Sevilla society, so all that I learned from you about Orientalism and perceptions of the East/West is coming in handy as I do my research!" - Erin Holstein ’09, Accepted into the MA program in Human Rights, London School of Economics, beginning fall 2011.

“I just wanted to say thanks for everything this semester. I've been in Guatemala for a medical mission for a few days now and I've been able to communicate really well with the people here. Just figured I'd tell you how applicable Spanish 103 has been in real life training.” Gracias, Adem Abrham, 5/20/12, Spa 103: History of Hispanic Art.