Professional Background
Andrea Fanta Castro is an associate professor of Latin American literature and culture at Florida International University. She received her PhD in Romance languages and literatures from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Fanta Castro’s research engages memory studies, Holocaust afterlives, and Latin American cultural studies. She is the author of Residuos de la violencia: Producción cultural colombiana, 1990-2010 and coeditor of Territories of Conflict: Traversing Colombia Through Cultural Studies. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Dr. Fanta Castro’s current work examines how Holocaust histories become partially legible in the postwitness era through archives and institutional records rather than family transmission. Her book project, “Cartographies of Unmemory: Holocaust Afterlives from Prague to Bogotá,” develops the concept of unmemory to examine silence, displacement, and postwar migration across Central Europe and Latin America.
Fellowship Research
While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as an Alexander Grass Memorial Fellow, Andrea Fanta Castro will examine how mixed marriages in the Nazi-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were reshaped by persecution, deportation, and postwar displacement. She will work with Theresienstadt (Terezín) transport lists, prisoner registration cards, and records related to the Prague AE transports of 1945 to study late deportations and the collapse of intermarriage exemptions in the final months of the war. She will also consult administrative files from the Protectorate, including conversion records and identity reclassification materials, as well as JDC, UNRRA, and Latin American immigration records, to trace postwar displacement from Czechoslovakia to Colombia. Her research also examines how Holocaust archives and digital repositories shape postgenerational encounters with erased histories.
Residency Period: June 1, 2027 – July 31, 2027