David NicholsGraduate Dissertation Completion Fellow

David Nichols’ work revolves around carceral space as represented in Latin American literature, specifically in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, post 1976.

He is interested in the those countries’ transition from dictatorship to nominal democracy, and the pivotal role incarceration played across them in the control of political dissent and the warehousing of those useless to neoliberal markets. He explores those systems’ hemispheric geographies of surveillance, incarceration, and extralegal murder and their tension with countergeographies of bodies, political movements, and subjectivities that challenge the carceral nature of the world we all inhabit. How the prison and the individual prison cell are the site of both the extreme restriction of the human body and subject, as well as inadvertently a stage for the radical reenactment and reinscription of them, is his dissertation’s main line of investigation. He also writes on prisons and incarceration elsewhere in (Greater) Latin America, including El Salvador’s recent and extreme prison and imprisonment expansion under a State of Exception, and hunger strikes in ICE detention in the United States.