Halle Keane

Halle Keane is a doctoral student in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. She examines how marginalized, non-normative subjects in 20th-century Latin America constructed their racial, sexual, and gender identities in response to political violence, with a particular focus on Cold War-era Cuba and the Southern Cone. She is broadly interested in theories of the body, political thought in contexts of revolution and dictatorship, and the ways in which cultural productions—literature, art, and otherwise—appropriate and transform state-sanctioned discourses of violence to resist oppression.

Prior to coming to Yale, Keane graduated summa cum laude from the University of Notre Dame with a B.A. in Economics and Honors Spanish. While at Notre Dame, Keane pursued questions of identity construction and political violence in a diversity of contexts and disciplines, ultimately winning the Walter J. Langford Award for Excellence in Spanish Literature. Her senior thesis, titled Machos que matan, machismo que mata: las políticas sexuales de la Revolución Cubana en El asalto y El Rey de la Habana, traced literary responses to the Castro administration’s utilitarian perspective of sex. In the summer of 2024, Keane also spent a month studying Afroargentine press in national and regional archives throughout Argentina, supported by a grant from the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

Keane is additionally passionate about public humanities, creative writing, and making music. This year, you can find her at the Yale Center for British Art, where she’s assisting the museum’s initiative to become bilingual. She looks forward to continuing to create inclusive, intellectually curious communities of learning and research at Yale and beyond.