Frank Graziano

Since the beginning of his career in 1990, Frank Graziano has written on an extraordinarily wide range of topics in Latin American culture. He retired from teaching in 2017.

His early work was on poetry, resulting among many other publications in the edited volume Semblanza de Alejandra Pizarnik (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1992). Later studies resulted in Divine Violence: Spectacle, Psychosexuality, & Radical Christianity in the Argentine "Dirty War" (Westview Press 1992); and in a book, The Lust of Seeing, on the Uruguayan fiction writer Felisberto Hernández (Bucknell University Press, 1997).

Professor Graziano also published Undocumented Dominican Migration (University of Texas Press, 2013), which analyzes the complex causation of boat migration, taking into account the interacting structural, cultural, and psychological factors that motivate migrant departures. Graziano organized a related conference, "Undocumented Hispanic Migration: On the Margins of a Dream," held at Connecticut College on October 16-18, 2009.

Many of Professor Graziano's books have focused on religious cultures in Spanish America. The first of these, The Millennial New World (Oxford University Press, 1999), surveys apocalyptic, messianic, millennial and utopian thought and action throughout the course of Latin American history. The book that followed, Wounds of Love: The Mystical Marriage of St. Rose of Lima (Oxford University Press, 2004), received wide critical acclaim for its rigorous and innovative scholarship. Graziano later published Cultures of Devotion: Folk Saints of Spanish America (Oxford University Press, 2006), which has a companion website: culturesofdevotion.com.

In 2010 Professor Graziano received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to study miracles and votive offerings in Mexico; and in 2014-2015 he had a Visiting Faculty Fellowship at Duke University to complete this project. The book that resulted, Miraculous Images and Votive Offerings in Mexico, was published by Oxford University Press in 2015 and has a companion website: miracles-in-mexico.com.

Professor Graziano is the recipient of many prestigious awards in support of his research and writing. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Carter Brown Library, the Fulbright and Fulbright-Hays Programs, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, among many others. He has been an invited speaker at many institutions in the United States and abroad, including Boston, Brown, Columbia, Duke, Emory, Johns Hopkins, New York, Princeton, and Yale Universities, the Americas Society, University of London, Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Pensamiento Latinoamericano (Buenos Aires), Universidad de Buenos Aires, Centro Bartolomé de Las Casas (Cuzco), and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (Lima).

Professor Graziano's active research and interdisciplinary methods translated in the classroom to innovative courses and dynamic teaching. His courses included "Religion and Violence in Latin America," "Undocumented Hispanic Immigration," and the service-learning course, "Proyecto Comunidad."

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Majoring in Hispanic Studies.