I am an Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Boston College. My research explores twentieth- and twenty-first century Latin American literature and culture, with a particular focus on the cultural history of modern Cuba, Brazil, and Argentina.
My first book project, Gastropoetics: Eating as Dissidence in Modern Cuban and Brazilian Literature, examines consumption as a site of critical reflection on biopolitics, cosmopolitanism, and national sovereignty. I also publish regularly on Latin America’s encounters with the global South, in particular the region’s cultural intersections with the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey. I am interested in what such South-South contact may tell us about the contemporary global order and the possibility of transnational solidarity.
I received my Ph.D. in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the University of Southern California, and hold a Master’s degree in English from the University of Warwick and a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Bogazici University. Before joining Boston College, I was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago.
My work has been published, among other places, in Comparative Literature Studies, Luso-Brazilian Review, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana, CR: The New Centennial Review, and Middle Eastern Literatures.
Selected Publications
The Literary Misencounter: South-South Hermeneutics in Asli Erdogan’s The City in Crimson Cloak
Comparative Literature Studies
An Early Encounter in the Global South: 'Abd al-Rahman al-Baghdadi's Journey to the Brazilian Empire
Luso-Brazilian Review (Most-read article of 2022)
Narrating Hemispheric Performance: The Repertoire in Daniel Alarcón’s Fiction
Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana
Eating (by) Oneself: The Wasteful Pleasures of Self-Cannibalism in Virgilio Piñera’s ‘La carne’
Revista de Estudios Hispánicos
Unburying the Specter: Postdictatorship Memory in Ricardo Piglia's The Absent City (La ciudad ausente)
CR: The New Centennial Review
Disciplinary Surveillance and Simulation in Esrar-ı Cinayat, the First Detective Novel in Turkish Literature
Middle Eastern Literatures