Sonia de Laforcade

Position
Ph.D., 2020
Role
Modern
Bio/Description

Profile

Sonia de Laforcade is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Radboud University, The Netherlands. Her research and teaching concern practices of pedagogy, critique, and memory in contemporary art and beyond, with an emphasis on Latin America and the Global South.

Her current book project examines the critical, pedagogical, curatorial, and artistic work of the art critic Frederico Morais in 1970s Brazil. One of the major aims of this book is to rethink the history of art history and criticism through unclassifiable critical practices that emerged at a remove from the discipline’s institutional centers. The book is based on her dissertation, which won the 2021 Jane Faggen Ph.D. Dissertation Prize. Her more recent research expands on her interest in contemporary artists’ experimentation with the practice of writing and its attendant values of literacy, memory, and critique. She is also developing a line of inquiry into public health and environmental crisis in contemporary art from Latin America.

Her research has been supported by a yearlong residential postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute, and by travel and writing grants from Princeton’s Program in Latin American Studies and Program for International and Regional Studies. Previously, she was Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon. Before pursuing her Ph.D. at Princeton, she earned her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College.

Selected Publications

“Click, Pulse: Frederico Morais and the Comparative Slide Lecture,” Grey Room 73 (Fall 2018): 96–115.

Frederico Morais, “Audio-Visuals,” trans. Sonia de Laforcade, Grey Room 73 (Fall 2018): 116–122.