Associate Professor, Comparative Literature and Latin American and Caribbean Studies Undergraduate Advisor, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Frans Weiser is Joint-Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute (LACSI). Dr. Weiser is also LACSI's Undergraduate Advisor. Before joining the University of Georgia, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on the intersections between American and Latin American cultural studies and historiography, Cold War Inter-American history, and adaptation studies. He has published articles in journals such as Rethinking History, Clio, Hispania, and Estudos de literatura brasileira contemporânea about topics including contemporary Luso-Hispanic and ethnic American historical fiction and film. His first book, False Documents: Inter-American Literature, Cultural History, and the Lost Decade (1975-1992) (2020, The Ohio State University Press) revises national and economic accounts of the 1980s by charting the concurrent hemispheric rise of cultural history. Examining the conflicting descriptions of the Americas afforded by Latin America's so-called "lost decade" and Francis Fukuyama’s claims regarding the end of history and the ascendancy of U.S. capitalism, the project demonstrates that on a cultural level the regions experienced a return to history that combated neoliberal agendas. Focusing on the period between the end of Pan-Americanism in the 1960s and the rise of hemispheric and border studies in the 1990s, the project resituates the prism of nationalism through which writers and journalists from Brazil, Hispanic America, and the United States have most commonly been classified. In response to questions of disciplinary exceptionalism, he proposes the Inter-American paradigm as a productive point of mediation between American and Latin American studies. He is currently at work on two new projects, one concerning the hemispheric role of Brazil in World War II and Cold War initiatives of cultural diplomacy, and the other analyzing twenty-first century cultural adaptations in Brazil. Research Research Interests: Hemispheric and Inter-American Studies, Latin American cultural studies, cultural history, Lusophone and and Hispanic historical fiction, adaptation studies
