Ericka Beckman

Department Chair
Associate Professor
ebeckman@sas.upenn.edu

510 Williams Hall

Office Hours
Fall 2026: TBA
Research Interests

19th- and 20th- century Latin American literature and culture

  • literature and economics
  • Marxism and critical theory
  • rural modernity and modernization
  • colonialism and neo-colonialism

My research focuses primarily on the relationship between literature and the history of capitalism in Latin America, from the 19th century to the present.  My first book, Capital Fictions:  The Literature of Latin America's Export Age (Minnesota, 2013), studied how literature represented the incorporation of the region's economies into world commodity markets at the end of the nineteenth century.  My second book, Agrarian Questions:  The Latin American Novel on the Road to Capitalism (Verso, 2026) examines how, over the course of the twentieth century, the novel became a privileged vehicle for evoking uneven but at the same time momentous historical transitions to capitalism in agriculture.  My current project studies how contemporary Latin American literature and film can help us periodize transitions into and out of neoliberalism.  

Education

PhD, Stanford (2005)

Selected Publications
Book
  • Agrarian Questions:  The Latin American Novel on the Road to Capitalism (Verso, 2026).
  • Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America's Export Age. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Edited Volume
  • Special Issue of Modern Fiction Studies, “Peripheral Literatures and the History of Capitalism,” co-edited with Oded Nir and Emilio Sauri.  68:1 (Spring 2022).
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
  • “Latin American Literature and Dependency Theory Today.” After Marx, eds Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon.  Cambridge University Press, 2022: 176-191.
  • “The Historical Novel in Peru: José María Arguedas’ Yawar fiesta.” Mediations.  Fall 2019-Spring 2020.
  • “José María Arguedas’ Epics of Expropriation.” e-misférica, 14:1 (2018).
  • “Rosario Castellanos’ Southern Gothic:  Indigenous Labor, Land Reform and the Production of Ladina Subjectivity,” Mexican Literature in Theory,ed. Ignacio Sánchez Prado, 2018:  139-158
  • “Unfinished Transitions: The Dialectics of Rural Modernization in Latin American Fiction,” Modernism/modernity, Volume 23, Number 4, November 2016, pp. 813-832.
  • “Jorge Isaacs’ María and the Space-Time of Global Capitalism,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 56:3 (2016): 539-559.
  • "Fables of Globalization: Race, Sex and Money in Nineteenth-Century Latin America." Tesserae: Journal of Latin American and Iberian Studies 19.2 (2013): 99-116.
  • "Fiction and Fictitious Capital in Julian Martel's La bolsa." Hispanic Review 81.1 (2013): 17-39.
  • "An Oil Well Named Macondo: Latin American Literature in the Time of Global Capital". PMLA 127.1 (2012): 145-151
  • "The Creolization of Imperial Reason: Chilean State Racism in the War of the Pacific"." Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 18.1 (2009): 73-90.
Faculty Bookshelf