Irina Carlota (Lotti) Silber

Faculty Fellow

Lotti Silber’s overarching work explores postwar processes in one of El Salvador’s former warzones and a region known for its peasant revolutionary participation. She documents what she terms the entangled aftermaths of war and displacement, aftermaths that have produced postwar deception and disillusionment and an “obligated” migration. Among her publications, Lotti’s book, Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador (2011) received the 2013 International Latino Book Award in the Best First Book, Nonfiction category. Lotti remains committed to pursuing various ethnographic genres. For example, she has been recognized for her poetry as evidenced in a first prize poetry award for her poem “Nanita,” from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Currently she is pursuing two projects. The first builds from her longitudinal research and explores the Salvadoran diaspora in the United States and Europe with an attention to the tensions between militant logics and humanitarianism. The second project, The Texture of Illness, is a new ethnographic study of childhood genetic difference.

Participating Years

2013–2014

Remaking Worlds: Insurgencies, Revolutions, Utopias

Building on the past two years of seminars devoted to the theme of “Uprisings” the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics will focus its upcoming 2013-2014 seminar on questions of insurgencies, revolutions, and utopias. We propose to examine each of these phenomena as ongoing processes rather than as singular historical, present, or forthcoming events.