D. Bret Leraul

Bret Leraul is a cultural critic who teaches courses on the history of ideas, critical theory, and culture in the Global South. Trained in Comparative Literature, Latin American and German Studies, his research focuses on contemporary Latin American cultural and social texts. 

Dr. Leraul is the author of Study Without Ends: Aesthetic Education in Neoliberal Argentina and Chile (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming) which examines the politics of cultural reproduction in the Southern Cone by analyzing the entanglement of literary and educational institutions since the 1980s. The book traces the introduction of a neoliberal rationality into higher education that facilitated the rise of a theory canon and subsequent canonization of theoretical fictions. In writing the recent history of the university and its theorization in the Southern Cone, Study Without Ends argues more broadly for reconceiving academic work as a form of reproductive labor in order to identify the university as a site for radical change. The book’s two arguments frame a reproductive labor theory of cultural production rooted in Latin America that has purchase on trends in contemporary world literature and higher education.

Dr. Leraul’s current book project, The Informal: Cultural Infrastructures of the Americas, analyzes case studies drawn from visual art, film, literature, architecture, urbanism, tourism, and cultural policy in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and the United States to show how restricted cultural production in the neoliberal era institutes among elites an aesthetics of informality, a new common sense that lionizes negative liberty by naturalizing inequality, precarity, and insecurity. 

In addition to his research agenda, Dr. Leraul is the English-language translator of Chilean philosopher Willy Thayer’s The Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University (Northwestern, 2025), an intellectual touchstone of Chile’s post-dictatorship period that was re-editioned in the wake of the country’s 2011 student protest movement. He was a longtime member of the editorial collective of LÁPIZ, the journal of the Latin American Philosophy of Education Society and currently serves on the faculty board of Bucknell University Press. 

He has mentored undergraduate research in the humanities and social sciences, and he looks forward to working with motivated student researchers, especially those with interests in the Global South, political economy or critical theory, or those with a command of Spanish or Portuguese. 

Personal website

Education

Ph.D., Cornell University (Comparative Literature)
M.A., Cornell University (Comparative Literature)
B.A., New York University (Comparative Literature)

Teaching Areas

• Comparative Humanities
• Latin American Studies
• Global South Studies
• Critical Theory
• Cultural Materialism
• Political Ecology

Articles and Chapters

“Unarchive 9: In the Ruins of a University, the Archive Speaks,” Diacritics (blog), January 31, 2025.

“Untimely, Uneven, Combined: Translator’s Introduction.” The Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University, by Willy Thayer, translated by D. Bret Leraul. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2025.

“Inactual, desigual y combinado.” Escrituras Americanas 6, no. 1/2 (April 2024): 461-69.

“Deus Ex Machina: Contemporary Argentina’s Literature of Infrastructure.” Modern Language Notes 138, no. 2 (March 2023): 503-528.

“Me veo a mi mismo leyendo: Ricardo Piglia’s Aesthetic Education in Los diarios de Emilio Renzi.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 56, no. 3 (October 2022): 342-367.

“War Over Measure: Latin American Cultural Policy and the Pedagogy of Neoliberal States.” Cultural Critique, no. 115 (January 2022): 35-75.

“Movement Rhythms, Motley Knowledges.” The Pedagogies of Social Justice Movements in the Americas, special issue of LÁPIZ, no. 4 (2019): 7-20.

“Surplus Rebellion, Human Capital, and the Ends of Study in Chile, 2011.” A contracorriente 14, no. 2 (2017): 283-307.

Translations

Larison, Mariana. “Beyond Constitution: Possibilities for a Contemporary Phenomenology of the Institution.” Translated by Bret Leraul. The South Atlantic Quarterly 124, no. 3 (July 2025): 507-520.

Thayer, Willy. The Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University. Translated by D. Bret Leraul. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2025. 

Thayer, Willy, Silvia Schwarzböck, Andrés Menard, Elizabeth Collingwood-Selby, and Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott. “(Post)Humanities and the University: A Conversation.” Translated by Bret Leraul, World Humanities Report. Madison, Wisc.: Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), 2022.

Barbosa Pinheiro, Lia. “The Sentipensante and Revolutionary Pedagogies of Latin American Social Movements.” Translated by Bret Leraul. The Pedagogies of Social Justice Movements in the Americas, special issue of LÁPIZ, no. 4 (2019): 23-40.