Fellow Focus: David Nichols
2024-25 Dissertation Completion Fellow David Nichols recently received his PhD from Emory University. In Fall 2025, David will be a Visiting Assistant Professor in Emory College's Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
In this conversation with Communications & Outreach Coordinator Karl-Mary Akre, David shares his work around carceral space in Latin American literature and how his Fox Center fellowship impacted his definition of democracy.
KARL-MARY AKRE: Could you give me a brief introduction of what your dissertation research examines?
DAVID NICHOLS: In the broadest terms, my research is on the relationship between mass incarceration and cultural production in Latin America. My dissertation focuses on the southern countries of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, and prose writing from or about prisons in the area straddling the dictatorships and the transition to nominal democracy. I'm interested in how both established writers as well as prisoner writers approach the prison as a space of social, sexual, and political experimentation.
And how does the Fox Center's 2024-25 theme "Democracy: Past, Present, Future" intersect with your research?
Democracy as a concept, both in its fullest expression as well as in its limitation, is really essential to my work. I think a prisons as this kind of limited space where what we call "democracy" is tested and defined. Much like the category of the enslaved person before it, the prisoner as a category is kind of what freedom is defined as against. So, if prisoners can't move freely, their bodies are not sovereign. And I think prisons globally are a key element in understanding some of the inherent contradictions of liberal democracy and racialized capitalism, which sort of walk hand-in-hand. How do we call a system "democratic" in which the majority of its largest racial groups can't even participate? Thinking about democracy through incarceration helps me question some of the binaries that more shallow definitions of democracy rely on, as well as see what those binaries and definitions camouflage.
In the context of the United States, there is this (too easy) binary distinction between liberal and conservative governance, wherein both cases we see both parties incarcerating millions of people using very cultural rhetoric around the border, etc. And in the context of Latin America, there is this binary of dictatorship and democracy where there's usually a very strong distinction drawn between those concepts. But if you look at those same countries today, they're incarcerating exponentially more people now than they ever did under dictatorships. Thinking democracy through incarceration highlights some pretty strong through-lines between systems that we see as too easily defined or that we're too likely to see as divided.
How would you say the Fox Center's interdisciplinary environment has impacted you and your work?
The interdisciplinary environment in the Fox Center has been extremely useful to me in seeing how people from other disciplines approach similar problems, especially how they negotiate some of the same keywords. Often, they do so in terms very, very differently than my own. And, in the case of this year, how they even understand the concept of democracy differently than I do. Having the opportunity to read their work and having them read mine while sort of negotiating those terms between us has been really exceptional.
What's been your biggest takeaway from your year at the Fox Center?
That democracy is not exclusively a political system. It's better thought of as a form of life than living.
I love the way you phrased that. If you had to describe the center in three words, what would they be?
Invigorating. Warm. Demanding.
And what advice would you give to Emory graduate students who are thinking about applying for the Fox Center's dissertation completion fellowship?
I would tell them to do it. It's really cool. There's rich discussion. There's office space. Free food. It's got everything.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.