I develop and teach interdisciplinary classes, including surveys of Latin American literature and culture, seminars on Latin American cultural criticism and critical theory, and comparative courses on world literature.

In my courses, I connect the literary and cultural materials we study to the world outside the classroom. This entails (a) making visible the local and global issues of race, class, and gender that such materials interrogate and critique, as well as (b) designing assignments that prompt students to reflect critically on their everyday reality, while remaining open to non-scholarly forms of knowing and feeling.

Talking to immigration activists at the Centro de Cultura Digital (Mexico City) through the McMullen Portal at Boston College. February 2023.

In the past, my students have participated in digital portals that put them in real-time conversations with local activists; attended a sci-fi convention where they experienced the subculture and its community; visited museums to learn about the curatorial process behind exhibitions; as well as participated in cooking classes and eaten at local restaurants to observe the ways in which food and identity are intertwined.

Students of “Food and Identity in Latin/x American Literature” learning how to prepare the Puerto Rican dish *mofongo.* February 2024.

RECENT COURSES

Animals & Animality in Literature

In this course we will read 20th- and 21st-century fiction centered on animals from diverse parts of Latin America, including Cuba, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, and El Salvador. The first part of the course will trace how animals mediate the founding hierarchies of modernity in Latin America and beyond: civilization/barbarism, indigenous/European, man/woman, human/animal. In the second part, we will examine fiction addressing contemporary issues through animals and animality: disability, consumption, immigration, narcotrafficking, and gender violence.

Latin America & the Global South

This course looks at stories, films, essays, travelogues, and telenovelas that thematize or emerge from Latin America’s encounters with the global South. We will ask if there’s a common denominator to such encounters, how they differ from more traditional North-South contacts, and whether South-South solidarity can bypass hierarchies of race, gender, and class.

Cover art from the *Tricontinental Bulletin*

Latin American Science Fiction

This course examines SF stories, films, graphic novels, and artworks from twentieth- and twenty-first century Central and South America. We will study the ways in which Latin American authors and artists appropriate this genre intimately connected with notions of Western modernity and technological progress.

Food & Identity in Latin America

This course examines how images of food and eating mediate questions of identity in Latin American literature and culture from the late 1920s to the present. Studying a diverse range of materials including essays, stories, manifestos, performances, and visual art, we will reflect on the ways in which such scenes intervene in contemporary discussions of identity, cosmopolitanism, and national sovereignty in Latin America.

The Poetics of Life in Latin America

This course will explore the representation of lives traditionally considered “other” in Latin America, namely those that pertain to to female, indigenous, Afro-Latinx, and nonhuman subjects. Taking our cue from theories of biopolitics, which examine the management of bodies by modern structures of power, we will analyze how lives are valued, ordered, and discarded in manifestos, stories, and novels.