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). I currently 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, The Global South City as Told by 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 and employ 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, The Global South City as Told by 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 and employ 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.