José Cicerchia currently teaches Latin American literature and film at Rice University. His main research interests are in postmemory literature, with a special focus on autofiction authors who are the children of people who were disappeared during the Argentine dictatorship in the 1970s. He received his Ph.D. in Spanish with a concentration in Latin American literature at the University of Houston in May 2023. In April 2023, he was inducted into Sigma Delta Pi, the National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society.

A native-born Argentine, he has written extensively about contemporary Argentine literature, translated the Peruvian author Sergio Galarza, and has forthcoming articles on the career of screenwriter Rodrigo Hasbún and on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s protofeminism. He has presented on literary works written during Argentina’s last military dictatorship and on autofiction and postmemory in Argentina. His current works in progress compare Argentine autofictionists and the Chilean second-wave postdictatorial writers referred to as “Pinochet’s children” by scholar Ana Ros and address Alejo Carpentier’s carnivalization of Afro-Cuban and Hispanized Cuban musical history.

He has been teaching film and literature at Rice University since fall 2023 and has taught classes on topics such as socioeconomic and political crisis in late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Latin American films and on comparative views of Latin American and North American short stories.