Néfer Muñoz-Solano is a graduate of the School of Communication of the University of Costa Rica. He worked as a journalist for the newspaper La Nación of Costa Rica, the news agencies Inter Press Service and Europa Press, as well as for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in London. He was president of the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents of Costa Rica (APEX). He received the annual scholarship from the Inter American Press Association (IAPA). Under the direction of Professor George Yúdice, he took a master’s degree in Latin American studies at New York University (NYU). He completed his PhD in Spanish in Latin American literature at Harvard University, where he completed his thesis under the guidance of professors Diana Sorensen and Brad Epps. For his studies in Portuguese, he received the Lemann Fellowship for research in Portuguese language and literature in Rio de Janeiro. He has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Spanish, English and Portuguese. His research interests include the intersections between literature and journalism in Latin America, Central American literature, Central American cultural production, literary theory, Brazilian culture, and novel theory. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Dallas. His research has been published in the United States, Spain, Mexico and Costa Rica, both in book chapters, as well as in journal articles, including the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, the magazine Istmo and the journal Estudios del ITAM.

Recent publication:

2024 (in press).“García Márquez’s literary smuggling in The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor”. Peer-reviewed. Texas Studies in Literature and Language. University of Texas at Austin.

2021. “Clamando y (re)clamando: Maurice Echeverría y Miguel Huezo Mixco, dos cronistas de la violencia en Centroamérica”. Peer-reviewed. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. Washington University in St. Louis. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/791055

2021. Muñoz-Solano, Néfer. “House of Cards y su narrativa: la realidad en la ficción o la ficción en la realidad” in Locos por las series. Editors Camilo Retana and María Lourdes Cortés. Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica. http://www.editorial.ucr.ac.cr/arte/item/2578-locos-por-las-series.html

2021. “García Márquez: el periodismo hiperbólico y la invención del diarismo mágico”. Revista de Filología y Lingüística. Universidad de Costa Rica. https://revistas.ucr.ac.cr/index.php/filyling/article/view/44439/44977

2020. “El espacio de las redacciones: novelando en el periódico y reporteando en la novela de América Latina”. Revista de Lenguas Modernas. Universidad de Costa Rica. https://revistas.ucr.ac.cr/index.php/rlm/article/view/41829/45074

2020. “Lima Barreto: la ficción y la no ficción en ‘El subterráneo del Cerro del Castillo’”. Peer-reviewed. Estudios. Escuela de Estudios Generales de la Universidad de Costa Rica. https://revistas.ucr.ac.cr/index.php/estudios/article/view/44810/44650

2020. “Lima Barreto: un escritor brasileño en la favela de la Ciudad Letrada”. Revista Estudios. Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México. Mexico City.

2020. “Una estética y una historia del sensacionalismo: el caso de José Marín Cañas y las imbricaciones entre el periodismo y la literatura en América Latina” in Orígenes y consolidación del sensacionalismo periodístico en Iberoamérica: México, Argentina y Costa Rica. Editor Francesc A. Martínez Gallego, Madrid, Fragua, pp. 241-257.

2018. “La lucha (de clases) de la cocina: los alimentos y la dialéctica de la apetencia en la novela Mamita Yunai de Carlos Luis Fallas”. Revista de Filología y Lingüística. Universidad de Costa Rica. No. 44, Volume 2. https://revistas.ucr.ac.cr/index.php/filyling/article/view/34670/34243

Rsearch project as CALAS fellow

Title: The environmental crises in Central America addressed through cinema and literature

Summary: Nature has always occupied a central theme both in literature and in the history, culture and memory of Central American societies. This project proposes an interdisciplinary analysis that combines environmental humanities, eco-criticism, literary and cinematographic criticism, and social sciences. The objective is to identify and analyze how literature and cinema between 1970 and 2022 have faced, thought, portrayed, and addressed the growing and diverse environmental crises that have been hitting the Central American isthmus in the context of the Anthropocene.

The starting point is based on the following initial research questions: How have Central America’s socio-environmental crises been addressed since literature and cinema between 1970 and 2022? Who are the authors and what have been the most representative works in literature and cinema that have addressed ecological and environmental problems in the Central American region? What kind of problems, tensions, and questions about environmental crises have these works dealt with, portrayed and denounced? What kinds of aesthetics and narrative strategies have been employed in these works to touch, address, and reflect on natural devastation and climate change? How do these literary and cinematographic works enter into dialogue with other cultural artifacts produced in Central America with environmental themes? And finally, what characteristics, differences, and similarities or communicating vessels do these Central American works have with other creations of a similar theme in the Latin American context?