Dante S. Prado

Dante S. Prado is a comparatist working on German, French, and English literature, film, and media theory, with a particular interest in laughter and gesture. He completed his PhD in German Studies at the University of British Columbia in 2026. He holds an MA in German from the University of Calgary, where his thesis on laughter in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain received the German Studies Canada Prize for Best MA Thesis, and a Licentiate in Foreign Literature from the Universidad de Buenos Aires.

His articles have appeared in Seminar, German Life and Letters, Monatshefte, and Word & Image, and he serves as Editorial Assistant at Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies. He has taught literature, film, history, and language courses in Canada and Argentina. His languages are Spanish, English, German, French, and Japanese.

His dissertation, The Gesture of Laughter: A Comparative Study of the Fascination and Dissatisfaction with Laughter during the Long Nineteenth Century, reads English, French, and German scientific, philosophical, and literary texts from 1789 to 1914. Drawing on Vilém Flusser’s theory of gestures, it argues that these texts reframe laughter as at once mediated and inaccessible, and that the strategies they devise to manage it fail, locking laughter in a loop of critical attention and dissatisfaction. The dissertation was supervised by Ilinca Iuraşcu.

His current project examines laughter and gesture in early cinema, with attention to hand gestures and acting in films by Ernst Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau, Paul Leni, Victor Sjöström, and Yasujirō Ozu.

With Martin Wagner (University of Calgary), he has worked on Against Illustration, a project on the history of the critique of pictorial illustration in literature. Its preliminary results are published at illustration.ucalgaryblogs.ca.

His earlier work, published in Spanish, addresses the Bildungsroman and narrative perspective in Goethe and Gottfried Keller.

The full CV, including conference papers, awards, and service, is available as a PDF.

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Email

dantesergioprado@gmail.com

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Department

UBC Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies