Meet Lara Norgaard, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature

Lara Norgaard is a first-year graduate student in the Department of Comparative Literature. She works with Indonesian and Latin American literatures from the 1950s through the present, with an interest in cultural and intellectual circulation, history of the Non-Aligned movement, translation, and post-dictatorship literatures.

Lara’s trajectory towards researching understudied connections between Latin America and Southeast Asia is grounded in her experience writing on memory studies in the context of U.S.-backed, anti-communist military dictatorships as a journalist and essayist. Lara began with a focus on Spanish and Portuguese-language literatures as an undergraduate student at Princeton University (B.A. Comparative Literature, 2017) and wrote a Senior Thesis on post-dictatorship Brazilian and Argentinian detective fiction. After graduating, she was founding editor of Artememoria, a free-access arts magazine on the Brazilian military dictatorship and continuities in state violence, based in São Paulo. She was also the Editor-at-Large in Brazil for Asymptote Journal, for which she curated content on related topics. In 2019, she moved to Jakarta to bridge her interest in South American dictatorship memory with the history of the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia. A 2019-20 Henry Luce Scholar, Lara studied Indonesian and wrote literary criticism on memory and contemporary Indonesian fiction for publications including the Jakarta Post, Mekong Review, and Public Books.

Currently, Lara is developing a research project on leftist cultural networks in formation between Indonesia and Latin America during the Non-Aligned Movement, which were subsequently ruptured during the 1965-66 mass killings of perceived communists in Indonesia. While important scholarship has been developed on Indonesian literature in this period and on transnational Cold War Asian-African literary exchanges, this research brings to light almost entirely overlooked cultural networks between Indonesia and Latin America, offering a new understanding of transnational decolonial movements in the 1950s and 60s. Her long-term research agenda involves tracing how this disappeared solidarity network has been mourned and partially recuperated in the decades after 1965, both while these U.S.-backed military regimes were in power and in their aftermath.

In tandem with academic research, Lara continues engaging Latin American and Indonesian fiction as a literary translator. Her translations of two short stories by Brazilian author Cristina Judar are forthcoming in Cuíer, a collection of queer Brazilian fiction from Two Lines Press, and her in-progress translation of the Indonesian novel 24 Hours with Gaspar by Sabda Armandio was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Grant.