Mario Alberto Rufer

Mario Rufer was trained as a Historian at the National University of Córdoba, Argentina. He earned a PhD. in African Studies, specializing in History and Anthropology, from El Colegio de México. Currently he is full Professor-Researcher at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico. His research interests are oriented to cultural studies and postcolonial criticism, and the social uses of the past and temporality: nation and public history, archives, memory, museums, heritage, disruptive perceptions of time. He has published on critical methodologies in cultural studies and social sciences. Rufer is a member of the National System of Researchers of CONACyT in México, Level 3 (maximum). His recent research projects have two main axes: the first one addresses the political uses of the cultural field as contemporary forms of sovereignty and as renewed modalities of distinction between history and culture. To do so, he works on the use of Mexican patrimonial narratives -mainly in community spaces, the illustrated maps of cultural diversity in Mexico, as well as activist cartographies and the specific ways in which difference is mapped in spaces of "plurality" and alterity. Secondly, he addresses subaltern forms of understanding temporality as restorative narratives of public and political memory in specific environments of violence in Mexico and Argentina.

Rufer has been visiting professor at the universities of Bielefeld, Germany; New York University; University of Cauca; University of Buenos Aires; Universidad Javeriana; UC Los Angeles, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, among others. His books as author or editor include La nación en escenas. Memoria pública y usos del pasado en contextos poscoloniales (El Colegio de México, 2010); Entangled Heritages. Postcolonial perspectives on the uses of the Past in Latin America (co-edited with Olaf Kaltmeier, Routledge, 2017); Indisciplinar la investigación. Archivo, trabajo de campo y escritura (co- edited with Frida Gorbach, Siglo XXI Editores, 2017), The Routledge Handbook to the History and Societies in the Americas (co-edited with Olaf Kaltmeier and Stefan Rinke, Routledge, 2020); La colonialidad y sus nombres (Siglo XXI Editores-CLACSO, 2022); El tiempo de las ruinas (co-edited with Cristóbal Gnecco, UAM-Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, 2023). He also writes fiction -when he can- and his first book of short stories is La raíz de los helechos (Cartografías, 2017). Most of his publications can be found in open access at: https://uam- mx.academia.edu/MarioRufer