Friday, November 7
12 noon – 1pm CT
Holton Hall, room 341
(2442 E Hartford Ave)
Free and open to the public

Hybrid event: join us on campus, or by zoom using the below meeting information

Zoom link: https://wisconsin-edu.zoom.us/j/97907192581?pwd=LMB6vtGLBJ4uusbcuFiHzwTgix299y.1

Meeting ID: 979 0719 2581 / Passcode: 981448

The UWM History Department and the Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies welcome Dr. Diana Aldrete to campus to share her current research.

This event is part of the History Department’s Brown Bag Lunch series. Refreshments will be served and all are welcome.

Literature and Justice: Language and the Fight Against Feminicides

This talk explores how contemporary Mexican women writers transform literature into a space of ethical and political resistance amid feminicidal violence and systemic impunity. It examines how language itself becomes an instrument of justice—naming violence, preserving memory, and refusing erasure when institutions fail to protect or acknowledge victims. Engaging feminist, decolonial, and human rights frameworks, the talk considers how writing practices grounded in care, mourning, and collective testimony redefine justice beyond the confines of law. Ultimately, it argues for a defense of literature as integral to political and human rights work: not as a supplement to activism or legal reform, but as a vital mode of articulating rights denied and envisioning forms of justice that legal and institutional systems have yet to realize.

Dr. Diana Aldrete is Assistant Professor of Language and Culture Studies and Human Rights at Trinity College. Her research, pedagogy, and artistic production, interrogates the intersections of contemporary Mexican/Latin American/Latinx literary, film and cultural studies, Mexico-U.S. border studies, feminist and queer theory, environmental humanities, and Human Rights studies. She is currently working on her first monographic book project tentatively titled Between Land and Death: Women Writing for Justice in Mexico, which examines how literary production, primarily by contemporary Mexican women writers, have become part of the political dialectic on anti-feminicidal violence as they question notions of justice, and place literature in conversation with activism.

Professor Aldrete is also an abstract visual artist and writer, who often infuses literary, musical, and cultural references in her visual art and writing.