Lecturer, Romance Languages and Literatures
About
Marisol Fila is a Postdoctoral Lecturer in Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, where she is also affiliated faculty with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She earned her PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish) from the University of Michigan in August 2025. Her interdisciplinary and multimodal research integrates Latin American Studies, Literary Studies, African Diaspora Studies, and Critical Media Studies.
Marisol’s first book project, Content and Form: The Multimedia Black Press and New Articulations of Blackness in Twenty-First Century Buenos Aires and São Paulo, analyzes how Black writers, journalists, artists, and intellectuals in these two Latin American cities strategically use digital and print media to express and shape their national and diasporic Black identities. This project examines the co-constitutive relationship between media forms and ideas of Blackness and citizenship, highlighting how contemporary Black presses like El Afroargentino in Buenos Aires and O Menelick 2Ato in São Paulo challenge narratives of racial exceptionalism and assert Black intellectual and curatorial authority.
Grounded in anti-racist critical pedagogy, community engagement, and public digital humanities, Marisol’s teaching is deeply intertwined with her research on Afro-Latin America and print and digital cultures. She employs a scaffolded, project-based methodology, incorporating public-facing and digital humanities methods like digital storytelling to develop students’ critical thinking, creativity, hands-on expertise, and intercultural awareness. Her courses provide beyond-the-classroom experiences, including collaborating with community members on documentaries and engaging with Latin American activists and artists as guest speakers. These experiences enable students to critically examine how media, literature, and the arts construct, reflect, and communicate Latin American cultural and racial identities within specific local contexts.
Marisol’s forthcoming scholarly and community-oriented project further extends this commitment to public and digital scholarship through transnational collaborative partnerships, including podcast production and a digitization and preservation initiative of cultural heritage to explore Black Spanish-Portuguese identities across the Black Atlantic.
