Manuel Sánchez Cabrera

Education

Ph.D. Candidate, in Literatures, Languages and Cultures of the Americas

Advisor:Lawrence Grossberg

M. A., Foreign Languages and Literatures & Speech Communication at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale 2016

Research Paper: “‘Performance Interventions’ y gestos descoloniales: Calle 13 y el sistema moderno colonial.”

B.A. English as a Foreign Language,
Universidad Pedagógica Nacional Francisco Morazán Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

About Manuel

Manuel is a native of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. His scholarship and teaching use cultural studies as an intellectual and pedagogical practice of inquiry to explore and contribute to multiple conversations about the peoples and cultures (including the diaspora) of Central America. He uses memory, affect, representation, and film and documentary theories as tools to explain contemporary issues in the region and its conjunctural changes. His research reflects on the ways the diaspora —as a new site of knowledge production— can intervene in the study of Central America and warns of the risks of seeing its study as another area studies in the United States.

He has presented his research at national and local conferences (SECOLAS, EILA, LASA, NC Conference of Latin American Studies), and has over ten years of teaching experience. His service as co-director/curator of the North Carolina Latin American film festival, organized by the Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at UNC and Duke University, has helped to increase—in the Chapel Hill and Durham communities—the knowledge of contemporary Latin America. He has organized multiple events at the UNC campus, and has invited writers, filmmakers and scholars such as Honduran filmmaker Katia Lara, film historian María Lourdes Cortés, and journalist and writer Óscar Martínez.

He has worked for high school students through the Learning through Languages High School Research Symposium, for UNC students at the Go Global Orientation of the former Center for Global Initiatives at UNC. In 2018, he was invited by the Center for Global Initiatives and the Institute for the Study of the Americas to serve as mentor/teacher for the 2018 Global Take off Puerto Rico program—which main objective was to give low-income North Carolina students an opportunity to travel and experience a different culture.

Due to his formation in cultural studies, Manuel strives to let students know that any struggle to change the world—even in ways that we know we cannot control—must begin with the understanding that the world does not have to be the way it is.