Pembroke Center

Nicolás Sánchez-Rodríguez, the Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr. Sánchez-Rodríguez is now a Cotsen postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Society of Fellows with an appointment in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Nicolás Sánchez-Rodríguez, the 2020-21 Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow, was a wonderful addition to the Pembroke Center’s scholarly community. Over the course of the last year, Dr. Sánchez-Rodríguez developed his dissertation, which he completed at Duke University in 2020, into a book manuscript, participated thoughtfully in the Pembroke Seminar “Narrating Debt,” and taught a very successful undergraduate course, “Boom Towns: Finance and Literature in Latin America.” 

In that course, Dr. Sánchez-Rodríguez looked at fictional cities in the works of major Latin American authors. How each city was rendered as an economic force within the capitalist world-system allowed students to examine how the authors challenged common-sense narratives about economic development, progress, and social structures. Dr. Sánchez-Rodríguez described the course as “an immense pleasure” to teach, and noted he was deeply impressed by his students’ ability to use literature to account for finance’s gendered history. 

The preoccupations of that course aligned well with the Pembroke Seminar “Narrating Debt,” which explored the many ways of narrating—or witnessing—the condition of being indebted and the historical rise of indebtedness as a mode of governance and mapped rhetorical or narratological techniques, genres, and gendered voices within various narratives of debt. The seminar was also helpful in unearthing a range of interdisciplinary perspectives and new research resources that were useful in Dr. Sánchez-Rodríguez’s writing as he expanded on his dissertation “The Minted-City: Money, Value, and Crises in Nineteenth-Century Colombia.”

Furthermore, in collaboration with Pembroke Center postdoctoral fellows Sa Whitley and Hannah Frydman, Dr. Sánchez-Rodríguez convened top scholars for a two-day April 2021 virtual symposium, “Unsettling Accounts: Intersectional Approaches to the Politics of Debt.” This well-attended symposium examined how debt operates as a mode of social control and discipline across axes of race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and ability. Public events like this one serve the broader community by driving scholarly discourse forward and creating new knowledge.

Dr. Sánchez-Rodríguez was a wonderful addition to the Pembroke Center community. Now, he is a Cotsen postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Society of Fellows, with an appointment in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He will continue researching the relationship between finance, culture, and power in Latin America since the nineteenth century.