Francine Masiello is Sidney and Margaret Ancker Professor Emerita in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese. Her teaching and research arc covers Latin American literatures of the 19th through 21st centuries and comparative North/South cultures.  She has focused on the relationship between politics and literature, culture under dictatorship and the transition to democracy, and, more recently, the global south as a problem for literature and philosophy. The author of eight books, and several critical editions and edited volumes, she publishes in venues in the United States and Latin America. Twice she received the Modern Language Association’s Kovacs Prize for outstanding book in the field of Hispanic Studies (Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation, and Literary Culture 1992, and the Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis, 2001). More recently, her book, El cuerpo de la voz (2013),  devoted to the relationship between ethics and poetry in modern Latin America, received the best book award from the Southern Cone section of the Latin American Studies Association.  Her new monograph, The Senses of Democracy: Perception, Politics, and Culture in Latin America (2018) focuses on the history of perceptions in culture, literature, and the visual arts from the 19th century to the present. (Ph.D., University of Michigan).