The IHGC is proud to partner with Global Spanish to offer a For the Humanities lecture and other events with Ignacio Sánchez Prado, with special guest Chef Victor Albisu.
In his lecture, Sánchez Prado argues that the idea of “public humanities” taking hold in the US academy today requires both a conceptualization of the right to culture and the arts, and a reflection on the role of aesthetics in the contemporary public sphere. The conceptualization of this idea will be done in dialogue with the ideas of public culture and education stemming from the robust cultural apparatus developed in Mexico in the wake of the 1910 revolution. The talk also argues that the current challenges facing the university humanities in the United States require understanding humanistic culture in its full contemporary breadth, banding together both traditional forms of elite culture with the studies of race, gender and the popular of the present. This broad view, in turn, will be discussed as essential for the continuation of the now endangered structures of democratization of humanistic knowledge in the university and beyond.
Following Thursday's lecture, UVA community members are invited to attend a panel discussion on February 13th with a focus on Sánchez Prado’s recent book, Taco. Register for the Thursday lecture and/or Friday's lunch seminar-panel on Taco by Friday, February 6th.
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Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado is the Jarvis Thurston and Mona van Duyn Professor in Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on Mexican cultural institutions with a focus on literature, cinema, art and gastronomy. He is the author of eight books including Taco (Bloomsbury, 2025), Strategic Occidentalism. On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World Literature (Northwestern UP, 2018) and Screening Neoliberalism. Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988-2012 (Vanderbilt UP, 2014). The most recent of his seventeen edited collections are Teaching the Mexican Revolution (MLA, 2026) and World Exhaustion in Latin American Literatures and Cultures, co-edited with Gesine Müller (DeGruyter 2025). He has published over one-hundred academic articles and chapters in journals and scholarly books across the Americas, Europe and Asia. His public writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders and other publications. He serves as editor of two book series: Latin American Cinema at SUNY Press and Critical Mexican Studies at Vanderbilt University Press. He served as the Kluge Chair for the Cultures of the South at the Library of Congress in 2021.