Jennifer Harford Vargas

Jennifer Harford Vargas (PhD, Stanford University) researches and teaches on Latina/o cultural production, hemispheric American studies, race and ethnicity, theories of the novel, decolonial imaginaries, narratives of undocumented migration, and testimonio forms in the Americas.

She is the author of Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel (Oxford University Press, 2017). 

She is currently co-editing Latinx Colombianidades: Critical Regionalisms and Diasporic Subjects with María Elena Cepeda, Johana Londoño, and Ariana Ochoa Camacho.

She is also the co-editor of Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination (Duke University Press, 2016).

Additional publications include:

• "On Huecos and Desaparecidos: State-Sanctioned Violence and Undocumented Migration in Latinx South American Literary Imaginaries.” Latinx Literature in Transition, 1992-2020. Ed. William Orchard. Vol. 3 of Latinx Literature in Transition Series. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2025.
• "Reimagining U.S. Colombianidades: Cultural Expressions, Transnational Subjectivities, and Political Contestations.” Co-Authored with María Elena Cepeda, Johana Londoño, and Lina Rincón. Latino Studies. 18.3 (2020): 301-325.
• "Moving Monuments to Undocumented Migration.” Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for American Civic Space, edited by Paul Farber and Ken Lum, Temple University Press, 2019.
• “Crossing por el Hueco: The Visual Politics of Smuggling in Colombian Migration Films.” Border Cinema: Re-Imagining Identity through Aesthetics, edited by Monica Hanna and Rebecca A. Sheehan, Rutgers University Press, 2019.
• “The Undocumented Subjects of el Hueco: Theorizing a Colombian Metaphor for Migration.” Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics, Special Issue Edited by Patricia M. García and John Morán González. 17 (2017): 31-53.
• “Transnational Forms.” Co-authored with Monica Hanna. Latina/o Literature in the Classroom: 21stCentury Approaches to Teaching. Ed. Frederick Aladama. Routledge, 2015.
• “Novel Testimony: Alternative Archives in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Callaloo. 37.5 (Fall 2014): 1162-1180.
• “Dictating a Zafa: The Power of Narrative Form in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. 39.3 (Fall 2014): 8-30.
• “Critical Realisms in the Global South: Narrative Transculturation in Senapati’s Six Acres and a Third and García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Ed. Satya Mohanty. Colonialism, Modernity, and the Study of Literature: A View from India. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Courses Taught

• ESEM 008: “Borders.”
• ENGL 193: "Latinx Monsters"
• ENGL 217: “Narratives of Latinidad”
• ENGL 236: "Latina/o Culture and the Art of Undocumented Migration"
• ENGL 237: "Cultural Memory and State-Sanctioned Violence in Latinx Literature”
• ENGL 237: “The Dictator Novel in the Americas”
• ENGL 250: “Methods of Literary Study”
• ENGL 276: “Transnational American Literature”
• ENGL 345: “Theories of the Ethnic Novel"
• ENGL 382: “Speculative Futures, Alternative Worlds" 
• GNST 245: “Introduction to Latin American, Iberian, and Latina/o Studies”