About
Sophie Esch is Assistant Professor of Mexican and Central American literature at Rice University. Her research focuses on revolutions and armed conflict in the Global South. She is the author of Modernity at Gunpoint. Firearms, Politics, and Culture in Mexico and Central America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), which won the 2019 Best Book in the Humanities Award of the Mexico section of LASA. Her current book project, Ecologies of War, is a book-length study on the interactions of human and non-human life forms in recent war and postwar narratives from Latin America and Luso-Africa.
Education
PhD with distinction in Spanish & Portuguese, Tulane University, 2014
M.A. in Latin American Literature, Political Science, and North American Studies, Free University of Berlin, 2009
Publications
Book
2018 Modernity at Gunpoint. Firearms, Politics, and Culture in Mexico and Central America, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, Illuminations Series.
Winner of the 2019 LASA-Mexico Section Award for Best Book in the Humanities
Edited Volume
2006 La gota de la vida. Hacia una gestión sustentable y democrática del agua, co-edited with Delgado, Martha; et al. Mexico City: Ediciones Boell.
Special Issue for a Journal
2020 “Passages: Routes of Migration and Memory in Central American Literature,” editor of a special issue of the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
2020 “Hippopotamus Dead or Alive: Animals and Trauma in Narratives of the Drug War,” Revista Hispánica Moderna (forthcoming).
2020 “Passages, Transits, Flows. Thinking Central American Literature across Space, Time, and Capital,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos
2018 “El rifle como reliquia en las memorias letradas sandinistas: Gioconda Belli y Sergio Ramírez,” Revista Telar, no. 21, pp. 113-136.
2017 “In the Company of Animals: Otherness, Empathy, and Community in De fronteras by Claudia Hernández,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, vol. 51, no. 3: pp. 571-593.
2014 “In the Crossfire: Rascón Banda’s Contrabando and the ‘Narcoliterature’ Debate in Mexico,” Latin American Perspectives. vol. 41, no. 2: pp. 161-176.
2009 “Travelers and Littérateurs at the Banks of the San Juan River” Ciberletras, no. 21: n.p.
2008 “¿El río San Juan como mausoleo de modernidades de Nicaragua?” L’Ordinaire Latino- américain. 211: pp. 145-164.
