Department of Spanish & Portuguese | Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Assistant Professor in Indigenous Studies
The Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean
Studies (CLACS) at New York University invite applications for an assistant professor tenure-
track position in Indigenous Studies, with a focus on Latin American and/or Caribbean pueblos
originarios/povos originários. This search is part of a cluster hire in Native American and
Indigenous Studies coordinated with the Departments of Cinema Studies, Performance Studies,
English, History, Social and Cultural Analysis and the Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
More information about this cluster, and NYU's broader Faculty Cluster Hiring Initiative, can be
found here. The successful candidate’s tenure home will be in the Department of Spanish and
Portuguese and will hold a joint appointment in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean
Studies and will advise and teach in the undergraduate, Master’s and Ph.D. programs offered
by both units, including teaching undergraduate and graduate courses conducted in English,
Spanish, and/or Portuguese.
The Department will consider applicants working in any period or area of inquiry within this field,
including but not limited to Meso-American, Andean, and Amazonian Indigenous formations. We
are interested in scholarship engaging with any genre of cultural, artistic, and linguistic
practices of the region’s pueblos originarios/povos originários including but not limited to ones in
conversation with: gender/sexuality; struggles for land and ancestral rights; sovereignty,
autonomy and survivance including plurinational constitutionalism and Indigenous legal
scholarship; politics, education and alternative epistemologies and ontologies; food sovereignty;
modes of companionship with the Earth and with other coexistents as well as practices of
resistance against extractivism, de-Indigenization and ethnocide. Comparative work in a global
frame, scholarship engaging Indigeneity as a political/historical formation, intersections between
Blackness and Indigeneity, or theoretical approaches to Indigeneity are also welcome.
Proficiency in one or several Indigenous languages, as well as work on questions of language
rights and multilingualism is highly encouraged.
The Department of Spanish & Portuguese is composed of a diverse group of scholars working
together to create a rigorous and inclusive environment for research and teaching. Faculty work
across literature, history, philosophy, law, art history and cinema, and around a range of key
themes including translation, migration, bodily and spatial performances, and the cultures of
sound. CLACS promotes interdisciplinary research and public knowledge of Latin America and
the Caribbean through MA degree programs, language training, outreach programs, and
scholarship on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and social justice. Founders of the city-wide
Indigenous and Diasporic Language Consortium, CLACS offers training in Quechua and Haitian
Kreyòl and sponsors a range of outreach activities with Kreyòl-, Quechua-, and Kichwa-
speaking communities in New York. We encourage applicants to imagine how they might fit
into—and expand—the intellectual profile of our community.
The successful candidate will have the opportunity to collaborate with many units and projects
adjacent to the Department and the Center, including NYU’s Global Site at Buenos Aires,
Argentina, and Study-Abroad program in Recife, Brazil, as well as the Center for the Study of
Africa and the African Diaspora, the Hemispheric Institute, NYU KJCC - a center dedicated to
Spain and the Spanish speaking world, the Critical Racial and Anti-Colonial Study Co-Lab, the
Latinx Project, and the Center for the Humanities.
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