Profile

Laura Catelli is Full Professor of Problematics of Twentieth-Century Latin American Art (Facultad de Humanidades y Artes) and Tenured Researcher of the Instituto de Estudios Críticos en Humanidades (IECH), of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) and Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina. She is also the Director of the Center for Research and Studies in Postcolonial Theory (CIETP). 

She completed her B.A. in Spanish and Portuguese at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Hispanic Colonial Studies, Romance Languages, at the University of Pennsylvania.

Catelli´s teaching and research are focused on the problem of race and gender in Latin American and Caribbean sociocultural formations, discourses, imaginaries, and their historically deep imbrication with colonial situations. Her research project at IECH, CONICET-UNR is titled “Postcolonial approaches to the problem of race in the construction of cultural imaginaries in Latin America”. She has worked specifically with the problem of mestizaje or miscegenation, from the perspective of postcolonial racial imaginaries. Her research is situated in the Humanities and dialogues with critical and theoretical fields that explore the epistemic, aesthetic, material, political, and subjective effects of colonialism, such as Colonial Studies, Latin American Colonial Critique, South Asian Postcolonial Theory and Subaltern Studies, and the Decolonial Turn. 

Current Projects

Catálogo de la Colección Arqueológica Wagner en el Museo Marc de Rosario, Argentina (Catalogue of the Wagner Archaelogical Collection in the Marc Museum, Rosario, Argentina). 

Catelli is curating the photographical register of the pieces, compiling and editing a series of essays by specialists on the collection from different fields (Ethnohistory, Archaeology, Visual Anthropology, Art History, Museum Studies), in collaboration with Fausto Battaggia of the Museum´s Department of Archaeology. The Catalogue is the result of a formal agreement of collaboration between the Institute in Critical Studies in Humanities and the Marc Museum. 

Pap. Archivos, materialidades y memorias subalternas en el museo del mestizaje. (Pap. Archives, Materialities, and Subaltern Memories in the Museum of Mestizaje). 

This book project is the culmination of five years of research on the Wagner Archaeological Collection and related institutional archives at the Marc Museum in Rosario, Argentina. Pap is a Lule-Tonocoté voice from the eighteenth century that means “a piece of something”. In this project, the term pap is deployed as a way to name the collection pieces not quite as objects, but as parts of a world that has been broken up and taken apart, by colonialism first and by other forms of extractivism later. As a critical and methodological gesture, pap allows us to pry open the subalternized historicity, and coevalness, of Indigenous agencies that have been negated on multiple instances and dimensions, by operations such as the narrative construed by the Wagner brothers, or the Marc Museum´s foundational narrative of mestizaje, in which Indigenous peoples are part of a static past that the Nation has superseded. As a conceptual continuation of Arqueología del mestizaje (2020), this project aims to collaborate in the activation of collective, decolonized memories, against the grain of instituted local and national narratives of Indigenous extinction.