Rafael Acosta Morales
Education
Ph.D. Cornell, 2014About Professor Acosta Morales
Rafael Acosta Morales is an Associate Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies in the Department of Romance Studies at the University of North Carolina. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cornell in 2014. His research interests relate to Political Theory, Latino Studies, Gender Studies, Comparative Literature and Mexican Studies. His work has appeared in Revista Iberoamericana, Latin American Perspectives, Latin American Research Review, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos and Comparative Literature amongst other venues. His last book: Druglords, Cowboys and Desperadoes, (Notre Dame, 2021) studies how affective structures represented in stories illustrate the substrata of political behavior. In particular, it studies how the cowboy’s use of weaponized trauma, creates the violence it proposes to resolve; how the social banditry vicious cycle reinforces the political capitalization that it claims to combat; and how the abstract institution built to assure equality under the law serves to naturalize the inequality it upholds. By studying the affective structure underlying political processes, the study produces an explanation for their resistance to rational discourse, which arises out of the fact that these political processes do not address the problem that generates the affect that fuels them.
Currently he is at work on two research projects: Immortal Stories, a study of contemporary and classical epics, and Reformando las masculinidades, a study of progressive discourses of masculinity in popular culture and music consumed in Mexico.