Daniel Nemser

Daniel Nemser is Associate Professor of Spanish in Romance Languages & Literatures at University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. His research focuses on colonial Latin America, with a special interest in questions of race, materiality, political economy, and indigenous studies/Nahuatl. His first book, Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (2017), traces a genealogy of the forms and practices of spatial concentration as a technique of colonial governance. It argues that the sites at which specific bodies and objects were brought together for particular ends constitute the condition of possibility for the emergence and consolidation of new racial categories, racialized subjectivities, and theories of race. One of the key questions it considers is the relation between these social formations and specific spatial orders or infrastructures, such as centralized towns, disciplinary institutions, segregated neighborhoods, and general collections. Currently, he is working on a book project about the rise of racial slavery and the development of circulatory infrastructures, primarily roads, in colonial Mexico.