Doctoral Graduation 5/3/19
I am an interdisciplinary scholar and teacher of Latin American and Latinx cultures with a Ph.D. in Hispanic Cultural Studies from Michigan State University (2019). For the 2019-2020 academic year, I will hold a visiting position in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University. My research interests lie in contemporary Latin American and Latinx cultural production that span a breadth of critical fields of inquiry intersecting in cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and urban studies. While my investigations have largely embraced Guatemala and El Salvador, I have also spent time in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Spain. I teach beginning, intermediate, and advanced undergraduate Spanish Language and Culture courses. My teaching at all levels seeks to help students understand the relativity of their own cultures in a global context.
My book project, In and Out of the Peripheral Network City: Urban Spaces Written by Violence in Postwar Guatemala, focuses on transformations of urban space and culture in Guatemala, both of which show permanent scars of a long civil war from 1960-1996. I originate a theoretical term--peripheral network city--to understand how the material infrastructures of state power and creative citizen strategies for documenting/countering state power coalesce to (re)construct the partitioned urban spaces of postwar Guatemala. I contend that both urban space itself and responses to urban space in the fictional and performative worlds reinforce violence as a structuring principle of culture in Guatemala. To this end, I also argue that Guatemala exemplifies post-conflict environments in Latin America and elsewhere in the Global South where state violence continues to reconfigure urban space as a social imaginary in the 21st century.
My book project, In and Out of the Peripheral Network City: Urban Spaces Written by Violence in Postwar Guatemala, focuses on transformations of urban space and culture in Guatemala, both of which show permanent scars of a long civil war from 1960-1996. I originate a theoretical term--peripheral network city--to understand how the material infrastructures of state power and creative citizen strategies for documenting/countering state power coalesce to (re)construct the partitioned urban spaces of postwar Guatemala. I contend that both urban space itself and responses to urban space in the fictional and performative worlds reinforce violence as a structuring principle of culture in Guatemala. To this end, I also argue that Guatemala exemplifies post-conflict environments in Latin America and elsewhere in the Global South where state violence continues to reconfigure urban space as a social imaginary in the 21st century.