Rate My Professor Zac Zimmer

Zac Zimmer is an Associate Professor of Literature in the Humanities Division at the University of California, Santa Cruz. An interdisciplinary scholar of literature, culture, and technology in the hemispheric Americas, his research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology. Key interests include Latin American literature and cultural studies, contemporary-colonial comparison, hemispheric studies, science fiction, science and technology in society, aesthetics and politics, digital humanities, indigenous studies, intellectual property, and astrobiology. He holds affiliations with Latin American & Latino Studies, the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas, Legal Studies, Spanish Studies, and Humanities Academic Services.

Zimmer is the author of First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (Northwestern University Press, 2025), a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and sixteenth-century narratives of the conquest of the Americas. This work employs speculative fiction to address silences in colonial archives, challenge myths of firstness, and explore unrealized historical possibilities. His previous publications have appeared in Latin American Research Review, Chasqui, Modern Language Notes, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Technology and Culture, and Revista Otra Parte, addressing contemporary Latin American literature, utopia, post-apocalyptic fiction, cryptocurrency, intellectual property, and the commons. Key articles include "Bitcoin and Potosi Silver: Historical Perspectives on Cryptocurrency" (Technology and Culture, 2017), "El ingenio de la inteligencia (The knowledge mill)" (Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2024), and "Barbarism in the Muck of the Present: Dystopia and the Postapocalyptic, From Pinedo to Sarmiento" (Latin American Research Review, 2013). Currently investigating the cultural infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC's Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature Department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics and technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure.