Cristián Opazo

WINTER 2024

Cristián Opazo (Santiago, 1979) is a Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC). After completing his Ph.D. in Spanish (UC, 2007), he travelled to London as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at King’s College (2009). With Theatre and Performance Studies as a starting point, his critical work explores the relationship among urban subcultures, marginalized masculinities, and cultural policies in contemporary Chile and Latin America. He is the author of Pedagogías letales: ensayo sobre dramaturgias chilenas del nuevo milenio (2012), and Rímel y gel: el teatro de las fiestas. In recent years, he has also published two edited volumes: Humanidades al límite: posiciones críticas en/contra de la Universidad global (2022) and Democracias incompletas: debates críticos en el Cono Sur. Between 2018 and 2022, he served as the alternate director of the Millennium Nucleus in Art, Performativity, and Activism, a long-term research project funded by the Chilean Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation. Opazo has served as Director of Research and Chair of Graduate Studies (School of Linguistics and Literature, 2012-2017) and Executive Director at the Center for the Study of Chilean Literature (2012-2017). He has also taken part in several projects of collaboration between his university and international associations (e. g., The Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities, and Universitas 21). In accordance with his commitment to the profession, he has also served in several committees related to the development of institutional policies for Arts and Humanities in the Chilean university system: University Committee for the Analysis of the Project of the New Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation (2016), and Advisory Committee for the Development of Arts in Research Universities (2017-2018). Opazo has been a visiting scholar at Georgetown University (US), Universität Leipzig (Germany), University of Notre Dame (US), and Universidad de Concepción (Chile); and he has also served as a member of several Ph.D. dissertation committees in universities from Brazil, Chile and the United States. Parallel to his research activity, Opazo has developed a series of podcast on topics of Latin American popular culture: Nada Está Perdido: Historias Latinoamericanas and Zodiaco Chileno, both of them produced by Radio Cooperativa and available at Spotify and iTunes.

Cristián Opazo will be teaching ILAC 273: Kids: Youth Cultures in Contemporary Latin America in the Winter 2024 Quarter.