Carmelo Esterrich
Email 312-344-7525
Carmelo Esterrich, Ph.D. received his doctoral in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin - Madison and is a tenured professor of Spanish and Cultural Studies. He holds a B.A in Film Studies from The Pennsylvania State University, and a M.A. in Spanish, also from Penn State. He has been at Columbia College Chicago since 1998. From 2002 to 2008, he was the Cultural Studies program director at Columbia.
Professor Esterrich teaches a variety of courses: Introduction to Cultural Studies, Puerto Rico and Post-coloniality, Western Humanities, and Revolution and Art: Mexico, Spain, Cuba; he also teaches all levels of Spanish language, including Spanish for Heritage Speakers, an important course to develop the language skills of US Latinos whose Spanish is not their first language. He has taught the Latin American Cinema course in the Film and Video department, and has recently been offered to teach a course on Eastern European Folk Dances at the Columbia College Dance Center.
His research focuses on the cultural and artistic production in Latin America, especially film, literature and music. In cinema, he has written on Mexican film comedian Cantinflas and also on the re-imagining of the ‘anthropological’ conquest of America in the films of Chilean director Raúl Ruiz. In literature, he has published on two Cuban writers: Reinaldo Arenas (and his notions of literary and sexual exile), and Severo Sarduy (and the notion of a transvestite as a metaphor for writing). He has also studied the dialogue of rock, punk and traditional Latin American music in two Latin American rock bands—Café Tacuba and Aterciopelados. More recently, Dr. Esterrich worked on the dismantling of the Mexican mother in the films of Arturo Ripstein and Paz Alicia Garciadiego.
He is currently writing the manuscript for a book on the arts produced, distributed, sponsored and consumed in Puerto Rico during the 1950s. The project looks at the complex and many times contradictory representations of the rural and urban landscapes of the Island—the plantations and the slums, the mountains and the factory, the peasants and the new urbanites—and delves into the national/cultural negotiations between film, literature and music.
Aside from his research, Carmelo Esterrich has been a dancer of Eastern European folk dancing, especially Balkan dances, in several companies around the country. In 1997, with the support and effort of the Ohio Council for the Arts, Carmelo toured with the dance ensemble Zivili throughout Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia to perform in many of the displacements camps created for the people of the former Yugoslavia. The experience profoundly changed his ides about the transformative power of dance and the arts.
Professor Esterrich and his husband, Joseph W.A. Myers, live in Downers Grove IL. Carmelo is from San Juan, Puerto Rico.