Bio

My area of expertise is 20th-21st century Latin American cultural studies, focusing on the analysis of countercultural expressions as they are represented in literature, film, popular music, and comics and graphic novels. My interests also include the cycles of political violence and impunity in 20th-century Latin American history as presented in its literature and popular culture. I have co-edited and published introductions and essays in the first volumes to bring together critical perspectives on the literary production of Colombian writers Andrés Caicedo and Evelio Rosero. I have also authored a number of articles on the tropes of death, suicide, and self-destruction in Caicedo and other Latin American writers, and analyses of the independent films of Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo, among others. Being a native Spanish speaker and a near-native speaker of Portuguese, I bring an integrated approach to the study of Latin American literature and culture into my research and teaching. I am currently pursuing a research project on Hispanic and Latino comics and graphic novels as they are slowly being incorporated into literary and cultural studies courses at the university level in the US and Latin America, with an interest in what this may indicate about the current agency and place of comics and graphic novels within the local academic, social, and cultural structures.

Department Member Since 2006