PLAS awards five to six Lassen Fellowships in Latin American Studies annually to outstanding first-year graduate students nominated by their home department who have a demonstrated commitment to the study of Latin America. This prestigious fellowship covers full tuition and fees for the first year, a 12-month stipend, and a summer grant to support research in Latin America.

Pablo Guarín Robledo (Spanish and Portuguese)

Pablo Guarín Robledo is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He holds both a B.A. and an M.A. in literature from Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. His research has mainly focused on the representation of structural and systemic violence, and on the treatment of forced disappearance in novels, photography, and cinema in contemporary Colombia. His master's thesis, dedicated to the concept of non-corpse and forced disappearance as a viral phenomenon in the narrative of Pablo Montoya and the photographic work of Jesús Abad Colorado, has been presented in different spaces, including the Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia (MAMU) in Bogota. He has also published peer-reviewed articles on Colombian literature and cinema. 

Pablo's interests in contemporary Latin American imag(inari)es around obscenity, censorship, disappearance, and spectacular violence are traversed by memory studies, film studies, new materialisms, and visual thought, as well as curatorial practice. A first art exhibition co-curated by him will be inaugurated in Medellín (Colombia) in September 2022.  

Tatiane França Rangel (Spanish and Portuguese)

Tatiane França Rangel is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She holds a bachelor's degree in Portuguese and French language and literatures and a master’s degree in literary theory from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She developed part of her graduate research at Nice-Sophia Antipolis University (UNICE), in France. Her dissertation interrogated the limits between historical representation and war testimonies written by female authors, focusing mainly on La douleur, by Marguerite Duras. Throughout her years as a graduate student, she published articles and book chapters, such as “Didi-Huberman and the writing: to try to see between the image and the concept” (Letrônica/PUC-RS) and “Among echoes and fractures - essay on a translation” (Editora PACC). She is a translator at the Laboratory of Poetics in French Language (UFRJ), and is currently evaluator in two literary magazines (Garrafa and Intransitiva). She has also worked as a French language and literature professor from 2019 to 2020, in the Department of Modern Languages at UFRJ.

For her doctoral project, Tatiane intends to investigate contemporary artistic and literary works which try to picture the dictatorial years of the Southern Cone. In her research, she aims to analyze especially the female experience of violence and repression that can be found in those works. Her interests include Latin-American contemporary literature, feminism, testimonial narratives and studies on memory and literary representation.

Vinicius Cardoso Reis (Anthropology)

Vinicius Cardoso Reis is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology. He holds a master’s degree in sociology from the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and a degree in law from Fundacao Getulio Vargas (FGV Direito Rio). He has worked as a researcher at Transparency International – Brazil and he is part of Grupo CASA, a Brazilian group dedicated to anthropological and sociological research of state practices, household dynamics, and the many dimensions of urban life. His academic work has focused on the role of uncertainty and the distinct perceptions of time in people’s lives, chiefly during crises and disasters. Through ethnographic research, he engages with anthropological theory on statecraft, uncertainty, economic practices and underlying inequalities. His master’s thesis, an ethnography on social change caused by a mining disaster in Mariana, Brazil, was awarded best in the department, nominated to the Brazilian Contest of University Theses and Dissertations in Social Sciences, and selected for a book deal in 2021.
In his upcoming research, Vinicius plans to focus on the disputes over possible futures for welfare in Brazil, as the country undergoes overlapping sanitary, social, economic and political crises. The broader questions that mobilize his work are related to how people enact strategies to navigate uncertainty, how moments of acute uncertainty differ from the instability of daily lives, how uncertainty manifests differently according to markers of social inequality, and what roles governments, state agents and public policies play in that context. Furthermore, he seeks to understand how critical moments shift the perception of past, present and future, creating new temporalities that combine memories and horizons, ruins and legacies, trauma and hope.