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Humanities Division
Associate Professor of Literature
Faculty
Latin American & Latino Studies
Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas
Legal Studies
Humanities Building 1
528 Humanities 1
Spring 2024: Mondays 2-3pm; or by appointment (email to schedule).
Humanities Academic Services
Zac Zimmer's research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in the Americas.
His first book, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (Northwestern UP, 2025), is a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and narratives of the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas. Previous publications on contemporary Latin American literature, utopia, post-apocalyptic fiction, cryptocurrency, intellectual property, and the commons have appeared in Latin American Research Review, Chasqui, Modern Language Notes, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Technology and Society, and Revista Otra Parte.
In addition to his current research on the infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC's Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics & technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure.
Latin American literature and cultural studies; contemporary-colonial comparison; hemispheric studies; science fiction; science and technology in society; aesthetics and politics; digital humanities; indigenous studies; intellectual property; astrobiology
