Jorge E. Cuéllar is a scholar of politics, culture, and daily life in modern Central America. His research and teaching focus on Central American Studies, Cultural Studies, Race, Migration, and Critical Social Theory.

His current book project, Everyday Life and Everyday Death in El Salvador, traces the practices of peoplehood, community formation, and everyday life-making amongst varied groups in El Salvador since the end of the Salvadoran Civil War. Via embedded observation, unstructured interviews, and archival analysis, this work explores the quotidian modes of living, thinking, and being produced by historical inequality, the postwar Salvadoran state, and by structural shifts in the transnational system. A multi-sited study, Cuéllar’s research attends to the cultural and political strategies employed by diversely situated in-country Salvadorans that, despite living in conditions of extreme marginality, economic abandonment and routine violence, engage in practices of refusal, survivance and critique that motion towards restored and dignified social futures.

Cuéllar’s research has appeared in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Comparative American Studies, Diálogo, Revue française d’études américaines, Latino Studies, and Radical History Review, among others. His public essays and columns can be found in El Faro, NACLA, Social Text’s Periscope, Los Angeles Review of Books, NLR’s Sidecar and Radical History Review’s The Abusable Past. Cuéllar regularly offers comment and analysis on contemporary Central American politics and society across a variety of media outlets. Recently, his writing has explored contemporary financial experiments in Latin America, the pandemic’s impact on Central American migration, and the authoritarian turn in El Salvador. 

Founded in 2019, Cuéllar also advises the Central America Project, a student-driven public humanities initiative focused on drawing attention to Central American scholarship, analysis, and culture in the U.S. and in the isthmus. This collective work produced the bilingual exhibition Bolas de Fuego: Culture and Conflict in Central America at the Hood Museum of Art.