Sophie Esch studies the intersection of literature, politics, and war in modern Latin America and Africa. She specializes in Mexican, Central American and Luso-African literature and culture. Her first book, Modernity at Gunpoint: Firearms, Politics, and Culture in Mexico and Central America, received the 2019 Best Book in the Humanities Award of the Mexico section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). The book provides a critical exploration of the political and cultural significance of firearms in the Mexican Revolution, the Sandinista Revolution, postwar Central America, and the drug war in Mexico. Its Spanish translation, Letra y metralla. Cultura y política durante los periodos de conflictos armados en México y Centroamérica won the Premio Iberoamericano of LASA in 2023. The book provides a critical exploration of the political and cultural significance of firearms in the Mexican Revolution, the Sandinista Revolution, postwar Central America, and the drug war in Mexico. She is the editor of Central American Literature as World Literature. And special issues on animal studies, Mexican literature and Central America literature for Hispanic Review, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Humanimalia.

Her current book project, Creaturely Cold War. More-Than-Human Narratives of War and Revolution in Latin America and Africa, uncovers a particular strand of global Cold War literature that relies heavily on nonhuman creatures and ecological entanglements to tell its stories and thus challenges bipolar, Manichean accounts of the period. The book provides a South-South comparison of prose fiction from Mozambique, Angola, Cuba, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Mexico.

Her research has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2022-24) and  the National Endowment of the Humanities (2020). At Rice, she directs the Initiative for the Study of LatinX America (ISLA) and the program in Latin American and Latinx Studies.She is a faculty affiliate of Politics, Law & Social Thought and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

Selected Publications

1. Books and Edited Volumes

• Ed., Central American Literature as World Literature (New York: Bloomsbury).
• Ed., Passages: Routes of Migration and Memory in Central American Literature, special dossier of Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 54/1 (2020).
• Modernity at Gunpoint: Firearms, Politics, and Culture in Mexico and Central America (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). Spanish translation 2022 as Letra y metralla. 
• Ed. with Silke Helfrich, Martha Delgado, Hilda Salazar, María Luisa Torregrosa, and Iván Zúñiga, La gota de la vida: Hacia una gestión sustentable y democrática del agua (Mexico City: Ediciones Böll, 2006).

2. Journal Articles and Book Chapters

• “The Animal Turn,” More New Approaches in Latin American Studies, edited by Juan Poblete (forthcoming)
• “Zapata in Candyland: Cards, Games, and the Mexican Revolution,” MLA Teaching the Mexican Revolution, edited by Ignacio Sánchez Prado. (forthcoming)
• “Bonding in the Anthropocene: Collapse and Conviviality in Claudia Hernández’s Speculative Fiction (De fronteras and Causas naturales),” Writing the Post-Global in Latin America: Collapse and Conviviality, edited by Gesine Müller and Jan Knobloch (forthcoming)
• “El reino animal del narco: Zoológicos, soberanía y fantasía,” El cártel que se repite. El mito globalizado del 'narco', edited by Oswaldo Zavala (forthcoming)
• With Ignacio Sarmiento Panez, “World Literature in Minor Key: The Central American Short Story,” Central American Literature as World Literature, 2023.
• With Alicia Miklos, “Stories of Giving Birth in Central America: Class, Race, and Politics in Women’s Health,” in David Dalton and Doug Weatherford (eds.), Healthcare in Latin America: A Reader (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, forthcoming in 2022).
• “Hippopotamus Dead or Alive: Animals and Trauma in Narratives of the Drug War,” forthcoming in Revista Hispánica Moderna 74/2 (2021).
• “Uneven Battles: Central American Cold War Literature,” in Andrew Hammond (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook on Cold War Literature (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 451-69.
• “Naturaleza, tecnología y guerra: Modernidad encantada en la musicá sandinista,” TRANS: Revista Transcultural de Musicá 24 (2020), 1-13.  
• “El rifle como reliquia en las memorias letradas sandinistas: Gioconda Belli y Sergio Ramírez,” Revista Telar 21 (2018), 113-36.
• “¿El arma en la sociedad? La novela del desmovilizado, militarismo e introspección en la obra de Castellanos Moya,” in Magdalena Perkowska and Oswaldo Zavala (eds.), Tiranas ficciones: Poéticas y políticas de la escritura en la obra de Horacio Castellanos Moya (Pittsburgh, PA: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2018), 189-211.
• “In the Company of Animals: Otherness, Empathy, and Community in De fronteras by Claudia Hernández,”Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 51/3 (2017), 571-93.
• “In the Crossfire: Rascón Banda’s Contrabando and the ‘Narcoliterature’ Debate in Mexico,” Latin American Perspectives 41/2 (2014), 161-76.