NOTE ON MARC ZIMMERMAN

Professor of Latin American Studies, Marc Zimmerman holds an MA degree in Language Arts and Creative Writing from San Francisco State U. and a PH.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California in San Diego. He has taught at San Diego State U. and the U. of Michigan Ann Arbor. He has served as a visiting professor of graduate studies at McGill U., la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua, la Universidad de los Andes (Tucumán, Argentina) and la Universidad de Puerto Rico (Río Piedras). He has worked in Midwest migrant farmworker and Latino community organizations; he served in the Ministerio de Cultura of Nicaragua in the first year of the Sandinista Revolution. At UIC, he directed the campus Latino Cultural Center from 1980 to 1985, when he joined LASt to develop Latino and Latin American Cultural Studies courses and programs in his unit.

Zimmerman has made presentations at innumerable conferences and colloquia and published articles in a wide variety of journals, including Telos, Boundary 2, New German Critique, Latin American Perspectives, Texto Crítico and Sub/Stance. In collaboration and on his own, he has published some thirteen books and editions: The Central American Quartet (Nicaragua in Revolution/ Nicaragua en revolución, Nicaragua in Reconstruction and at War, El Salvador at War and Guatemala: Voces desde el silencio [Mpls.: MEP, 1980, 1985 and 1988; Guatemala: Oscar León Palacios, 1993]Bthis last book published in English by Ohio U. Press 1998); Processes of Unity in Caribbean Societies, Ideologies and Literatures (with Ileana Rodríguez) and Lucien Goldmann y el estructuralismo genético (Mpls.: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature 1983 and 1985). He has also co-edited Nuestro Rubén Darío in Nicaragua (1980); and has edited and translated Flights of Victory by Ernesto Cardenal (1985). Perhaps his best known books are Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions (with John Beverley, Austin: U. of Texas 1990), U.S. Latino Literature (1992), Literature and Resistance in Guatemala: Textual Modes and Cultural Politics from El señor Presidente to Rigoberto Menchú (Ohio University Press, 2 vols, 1995). With Michael Piazza, he edited New World [Dis]Orders and Peripheral Strains: Specifying Cultural Dimensions on Latin American and Latino Studies (MARCH/Abrazo, 1998); with Luis Felipe Díaz, he has published Globalización, nación, postmodernidad. Estudios culturales puertorriqueños ( Editorial LACASA Puerto Rico, 2001); he has also completed a co-edited volume on Latin American Cities, while working on a companion co-edited collection on Latinos in U.S. transnational urban and border contexts. He is developing additional edited volumes on Central American and Chicago Latino cultural studies, while completing a theoretical book-in-process on Latin American cultural studies and globalization. These recent and forthcoming books are projects of the Chicago Latin American/Latino/a Activities and Studies Arena (LACASA CHICAGO), an organization Zimmerman directs and which is dedicated to networking and promoting valuable cultural and artistic projects in local, national and international, academic and community, contexts.

Zimmerman has won Fulbright, Newberry, Del Amo, Illinois Arts and Humanities Council grants; and served as committee member and/or reader for awards committees of the Council of International Education (Fulbright), FIPSE, NEH and other entities. He won a Rockefeller grant leading to a conference he coordinated on Mapping Latin American Chicago (Fall 1998). He has also served as consultant to numerous publishers and academic institutions, and served on the jury for Cuba=s Casa de las Américas Caribbean literature prize for 1994. He was recently elected Co-Chair of the Central American Task Force of the Latin American Studies Association and was named as a Board member of the Central American Literature and Arts Doctoral Program of the National University of Costa Rica (Heredia).