Assistant Professor of Spanish and Program Faculty in Comparative Literature at Texas Tech University
My research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary Latin American culture, critical theory, theory of the novel, and the aesthetics of dependency.
My first book, Latinamericanism and the Novel: Three Studies (Cambridge UP, 2027), examines how the revolutionary enthusiasm of the 1960s motivated a literary exploration of Latin America’s capitalist development and how, by formally engaging in that exploration, the Latin American novel radically probed the utopian dimensionality of the novel form.
My second book, tentatively titled Worldly Situations: Form, Space, and the Mexican Novel’s Countertopographical Imagination, studies how the Mexican novel of the long sixties gives form to the unevenness of the world economy and registers the worldly orientations of everyday life in mid-twentieth century Mexico.
I am the founding organizer of the Mexican Studies Research Collective, the book reviews editor of the journal Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, and a member of the Modern Language Association’s LLC Mexican Forum Executive Committee. Before moving to Lubbock, I was Visiting Assistant Professor of Mexican/Latinx Literature at the University of Cincinnati and Mellon Doctoral Dissertation Fellow with the Humanities + Urbanism + Design Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania.
Latinamericanism and the Novel: Three Studies
Latinamericanism and the Novel queries how the Latin American novel strove to combine political struggle and critical speculation in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. Through close readings of Rosario Castellanos’s The Book of Lamentations, Juan Carlos Onetti’s The Shipyard, and Jorge Amado’s Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, this Element argues that the effort to register the dialectical patterns of peripheral capitalist sociality led the Latin American novel to increasingly partake in the utopian figuration of possibility. Exploring the peculiar coalition between the Latinamericanist concerns of the 1960s and the utopian dimensionality of the novel form, the three studies gathered in this Element show how the Latin American novel cultivated a politics of solidarity with the future.
Contents
Introduction: Close Reading Latin America
1. The Struggle with Realism, or, The Politics of Transition
2. What’s in and Atmosphere? Or, The Politics of Scale
3. The Time of Monsters, or, The Politics of Combination
Epilogue: Architectures of the Future
Expected online publication: 21 January 2027