Modern Languages

Chisu Teresa Ko
Chisu Teresa Ko

Chisu Teresa Ko

Chisu Teresa Ko teaches Spanish language and culture courses at all levels as well as Latin American Studies courses in English. She specializes in Latin American literary and cultural studies with a focus on nineteenth-century and contemporary Argentina. She is particularly interested on issues of race and ethnicity, multiculturalism, national identity, and the connections between Asia and Latin America. Her current book project, Argentina: Race in a Raceless Nation, examines racial discourses in Argentine cultural production from the nineteenth century to the present. Ko has been named a 2020 ACLS Fellow and 2021 UMBC Inclusion Imperative Visiting Faculty Fellow. 

Department

Modern Languages

Degrees

  • Ph.D., Columbia University

Teaching

  • SPAN 201 Conversation and Composition
  • SPAN 202 Hispanic Short Fiction and Film
  • SPAN 252 Survey of Latin American Literature
  • SPAN 340 Racial Discourses in Argentina
  • SPAN 440 Race and Nation in Argentina and Cuba
  • LAS 200 Introduction to Latin American Studies
  • LAS 332 Latin America through Film 
  • LAS 332 Latin American Studies
  • LAS 332 Afro-Latin America
  • CIE 200 Common Intellectual Experience

Research Interests

  • 19th- and 20th-century Latin American literary and cultural studies
  • Race and ethnicity
  • Racial discourses in Argentina
  • Asians in Argentina
  • Criollo Popular Theater

Recent Work

“Race and Nation.” In A History of Argentine Literature. Eds. Alejandra Laura and Mónica Szurmuk. Cambridge UP. 2024.

“‘In defense of the people of color of South America’: a new source for twentieth-century Afro-Argentine history and thought.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. 

Antipodal Connections: Two Argentine Documentaries and their Korean Women Subjects.” Film Quarterly. 74.4.

Tres documentales desde la comunidad coreana en Argentina.” Latin American Research Review. 55.4.

Self-Orientalism and Inter-Imperiality in Anna Kazumi Stahl’s Flores de un solo día.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. 14.1.

Orientalism and De-Orientalism in Contemporary Latin America: Reading César Aira.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World. 8.3

Toward Asian-Argentine Studies.” Latin American Research Review 51.4.

“Between Foreigners and Heroes: Asian-Argentines in a Newly Multicultural Nation.” Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina. Eds. Paulina Alberto and Eduardo Elena. Cambridge UP. 2016.

‘Argentina te incluye’: Asians in Argentina’s Multicultural Novels.” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 69.1.

From whiteness to diversity: crossing the racial threshold in bicentennial Argentina.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 37.14.