Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, The University of Texas at Austin (2011)

M.A. in Spanish, Middlebury College (2003)

B.A. in English and Spanish, Baylor University (2002)

In my research, I am broadly interested in the circulation of of texts and tropes around the Global South, with a particular focus on the Caribbean and Africa.

My book, Forms of Disappointment. Cuban and Angolan Narrative After the Cold War (SUNY Press, 2019), examines how late 20th and early 21st century Cuban and Angolan novels revisit literary forms and practices associated with the early years of revolutionary enthusiasm. I show that these techniques, which together I call a poetics of disappointment, constitute a new formal and affective relationship to the histories of revolution shared across the South Atlantic. Research for this project was supported by the Kluge Center at the U.S. Library of Congress and the Luso-American Development Foundation/ Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo in Lisbon, Portugal.

I am currently working on a translation of Angolan intellectual Mário Pinto de Andrade's essays on African liberation, national development, and Black cultural vindication. Other projects underway include a book on gender and empire in contemporary Luso-Afro-Brazilian fiction, and a new project on speculative geographies and lifeless bodies in Latin American literature.

Languages: Spanish and Portuguese.

Book:

Forms of Disappointment. Cuban and Angolan Narratives After the Cold War. SUNY Press. 2019.

http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6786-forms-of-disappointment.aspx

Edited Journal issue:

"Cuba and the Global South." The Global South 13.1 (Spring, 2019 [2020]).

Articles:

"Cuban Revolutionary Literature." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, forthcoming.

“Manuel Rui and Postcolonial Angola As It Is Not.” Thinking World Literature from Lusophone Perspectives, special issue of the Journal of Lusophone Studies, ed. Krista Brune and Thayse Leal, vol. 6, no. 1, 2021, pp. 110-130.

“Mário Pinto de Andrade, the Cultural Congress of Havana, and the Role of Culture in the Global South.” The Cultural Cold War and the Global South: Sites of Contest and Communitas. Ed. Kerry Bystrom, Monica Popescu, and Katherine Zien. Routledge, 2021, pp 45-61.

“Nicolás Guillén and Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa (1953).” Transatlantic Studies. Iberia, Latin America, Africa, edited by Cecilia Enjuto Rangel, Sebastiaan Faber, Pedro García Caro, and Robert Newcomb, Liverpool UP, 2019.

"Luanda in Santiago and Santiago in Luanda: Trans-Atlantic Dimensions in Cuban and Angolan Poetry." MLN, vol. 133, no. 5, 2018, pp. 1277-1303.

“Postwar Politics in O herói and Kangamba.” The Global South Atlantic, edited by Kerry Bystrom and Joseph Slaughter, Fordham UP, 2018, pp. 207-224.

"La ironía en dos obras de Alejo Carpentier: El siglo de las luces y La consagración de la primavera." 200/ 100/ 50: Carpentier, la emancipación y las revoluciones americanas, edited by Luisa Campuzano, Letras Cubanas, 2015, pp. 251-264.

"Circling the South Atlantic: Revolution in J. E. Agualusa's The Year That Zumbi Took Rio." The Global South vol. 7, no. 2, 2014, pp. 87-109.

"Practices of the Plantation in La loma del ángel." Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literatures vol 37, no. 1, 2013, pp. 92-112.

"Aguas inquietas: La Kianda en tres novelas angoleñas contemporáneas." Revolución y Cultura no. 1, 2013, pp. 16-22.

“A Friendship Forged With Blood: Cuban Literature of the Angolan War.” Romance Notes, vol. 52, no. 3, 2012, pp. 325-332.

Fall 2023:

SPAN 490: The Cuban Revolution in Context

Offered Periodically:

Several courses may be available for upper-division Portuguese credit. Please see me to find out more.

Caribbean Crossings (Grad/ Undergrad)

Comparison from the South (Grad; COLT 615)

Cultures of the Cuban Revolution in Context (Grad/ Undergrad)

Theorizing the Plantation (Grad/ Undergrad; Spanish/Portuguese)

Runaways, Rebellions and Revolutions in the Black Atlantic (Grad/ Undergrad; Spanish/Portuguese)

Afro-Latin American Literature (Grad/ Undergrad; Spanish/Portuguese)

The Latin American Dictator Novel (Grad/ Undergrad)

Hispanic Cultures Through Literature III (SPAN 343)

Hispanic Cultures Through Literature IV (SPAN 344)

Introduction to Narrative (SPAN 353)

The Chinese in Latin America (Undergrad; SPAN/ CHN 200M)

Intro to Luso-Brazilian Literature and Culture, 19th-21st Centuries (PORT 399)

Traveling the Portuguese-Speaking World (Grad/ Undergrad; English/ Portuguese)