Lois Parkinson Zamora

Lois Parkinson Zamora is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Houston. She is a leader in the comparative study of literature of the Americas. Her most recent book, Beyond Individualism: Portraying Collective Selfhood in Latin American Literature and Art (University of Chicago Press, 2025), considers collective identities over two centuries in Latin American literature and the visual arts. This book was awarded the Harry Levin Prize by the American Comparative Literature Association for the best book in comparative literary studies published during 2006 and 2007. Her previous books include Writing the Apocalypse (Cambridge University Press, 1989) and The Usable Past (Cambridge University Press, 1997), both of which examine the nature of historical imagination and its representations in contemporary US and Latin American fiction. Both books have been translated into Spanish and published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica. She has also edited collections of essays, including Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, with Wendy B. Faris (Duke University Press, 1995), Contemporary American Women Writers: Gender, Class, Ethnicity (Longman, 1998), and Image and Memory: Photography from Latin America 1866–1994, with Wendy Watriss (University of Texas Press, 1998). Image and Memory was recognized as the best new art book of 1998 by the Association of American Publishers. Her most recent publication is an edited anthology of essays on the New World Baroque, co-edited with Monika Kaup, titled Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (Duke University Press, 2010).