Institution:
Lecturer in Latinx Studies, Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights (EMR), Harvard University; Faculty Director, Latinx Studies Working Group

Interests:
Latinx literature, culture, and visual arts; Black and Afrodiasporic studies; medical humanities; decolonial trauma theory; feminist and queer of color critique; Afro‑Latinidades and world diasporas; decolonial healing and resistance

Description:
Aitor Bouso‑Gavín is a Lecturer of Latinx Studies in Harvard’s Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights and faculty director of the Latinx Studies Working Group, whose research centers on U.S. Latinx and Caribbean literature, culture, and visual arts with a focus on how creative expression of internalized harm and trauma can become a catalyst for personal, political, and social healing. He completed his PhD in Hispanic Literatures and Linguistics at UMass Amherst in 2024 and has received multiple honors, including the 2023–24 Mellon Sawyer dissertation fellowship on Race and Visual Culture in the Americas and the 2023 Victoria Urbano award from the International Association of Gender and Sexuality Studies. His current book manuscript, Genealogies of the Wound: Decolonial Healing and Resistance in Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Arts, proposes the “wound” as an analytic and biomedical‑critical paradigm to foreground Caribbean and Latinx cultural production as a site for imagining alternative forms of healing and relationality beyond Western scientific and secular frameworks. In 2024 he launched the Afro‑Latinidades and World Diasporas Initiative at Harvard, which uses courses, public programs, and community‑engaged events to center Afro‑Latinx histories, arts, and politics and to build new pedagogies and solidarities across global Black and Latinx diasporas.