Biography
My research and teaching fields of interest include 20th/21st-century literature, Latino/a/x literature and culture, hemispheric American and borderlands literature, the baroque/neobaroque/New World baroque, and critical theory. My work has appeared in American Literature, Chasqui, Comparative Literature, Contemporary Literature, CR: The New Centennial Review, MLQ, Modernism/Modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, and PMLA.
My new book, New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory is forthcoming in the “Speculative Realism” series of Edinburgh UP (2021). It advocates for a new contextual realism of complex and embedded wholes, actor-networks, and ecologies. It brings together four groups of theories/theorists that have never been considered together before: Bruno Latour, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Markus Gabriel, Jean-Luc Marion and Alphonso Lingis. Pairing philosophy with literature, it proposes that post-apocalyptic literature (by Margaret Atwood, José Saramago, Octavia Butler, and Cormac McCarthy) also embeds a new systems vision of the real, which it enacts in the narrative mode of apocalyptic endism.
My most recent books focus on the transhistorical and transnational continuities of the baroque. Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (co-edited with Lois Parkinson Zamora, Duke UP 2010), traces the changing nature of baroque representation in Europe and the Americas across four centuries, from its 17th-century origins as a Counter-Reformation and monarchical aesthetic and ideology to its contemporary function as a postcolonial ideology aimed at disrupting entrenched power structures and perceptual categories.
Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film (Virginia UP 2012), is a comparative, hemispheric American study of the neobaroque in modern and postmodern North American, Latin American, and U.S. Latino literature, film, visual arts, and theory. Reflecting on the rich, non-linear transhistorical and transcultural genealogy of baroque expression, Neobaroque in the Americas envisions the baroque as an anti-proprietary expression that brings together seemingly disparate writers and artists: U.S. modernists T.S. Eliot and Djuna Barnes, contemporary anti-dictatorship literature and film from Chile and Argentina by Diamela Eltit, José Donoso, Raúl Ruiz and María Luisa Bemberg, popular baroques in U.S. Latino/a visual culture and art, including the work of Amalia Mesa-Bains, Rubén Ortiz Torres, and Luis Gispert.