Profile

Trained in Spain, the UK, and the US, I work on Comparative Literatures of the Americas with a concentration on transnational, post-colonial, and neo-colonial cultural production. The critical methodologies of my research engage the combined humanistic traditions of textual analysis, cultural history, literary criticism and theory, with socio-political conceptualizations of nation and nature. I am particularly drawn towards historically-placed, materialist readings of aesthetic practice.

My early research focused on the critical relations between nationalist narratives and the discourses of progress and modernity as seen by intellectuals and writers in Latin America and the US. Out of that research emerged my first monograph After the Nation: Postnational Satire in the Works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2014) which theorizes the emergence of a hemispheric “new leftist” sphere of post-nationalist literary encodements during the Cold War and beyond. I interrogate the role of these canonical authors whose works sit squarely in the center of their respective national literary systems despite the fact that their Postnational satires engage in an in-depth questioning of official histories, epic narratives, and the grand discourses of national identity.

Discussions of Hispanidad, Mexicanidad, and Americanness are an important part of my syllabi and scholarly production. I ham currently completing a manuscript on the ways in which Spanish writers portrayed Latin American nationalisms and thought about the collapse of the Spanish empire after Latin American wars for independence (from the early 19th Century to the 1930s).

Literary, visual, and intellectual debates about mining and extractivism in the Americas conform the center of my second current book project. I delve into the archives of the lettered city and its often ambivalent relation with extractive industries throughout the post-colonial period. Seeking to unearth the records of these debates from the time of independence into the present era, I engage a diversity of themes such as the contradictory and embattled figure of the miner as both victim of social exploitation and agent of ecological destruction; the different utopian horizons of anarchist, liberal-capitalist, and socialist writers and political theorists; and the early constitution of an eco-critical cultural resistance to unsustainable extractivist practices in the hemisphere.

As a result of my research into the debates over mining in the period of Mexican independence (1810-1821), I have identified a number of key voices and cultural agents who allow me to situate mining at the center of the letrado debates about political dependency and emancipation. One such voice is the liberal-leaning autonomist scientist and poet Fermín de Reygadas (1754-1824?) who actively participated in these debates with an abundance of pamphlets and a direct engagement with well-known figures such as Andrés Quintana Roo (1787-1851). My exploration into this early archive has already resulted in a critical, annotated edition of the first Spanish-language play performed in colonial California, Astucias por heredar un sobrino a un tío, by Fermín de Reygadas (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2018. Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage), this is a neoclassical play, censored in Mexico City in 1790 and smuggled and performed in Alta California shortly after. A series of contemporary adaptations and performances of this play demonstrates its relevance for a modern Latino audience in the US.

As a scholar with Transatlantic interests, I am a co-editor with Sebastiaan Faber (Oberlin College), Cecilia Enjuto Rangel (University of Oregon), and Robert Newcomb (UC Davis) of the volume Transatlantic Studies: Iberia, Latin America, Africa (Liverpool University Press: 2019). This volume offers a new paradigm for open discussions about the configuration of traditional fields and departmental divisions challenging national and linguistic biases in the study of transnational cultural relations in the Atlantic basin.