Research
I am a scholar of 20th and 21st century Latin American literature, visual culture, and other cultural artifacts, in particular from Argentina and Mexico.
My current book project, Alternative Maternities: Corporality, Gender, and Citizenship in Argentina, engages with depictions of sacrificial motherhood in Argentina and its intersection with non-normative definitions of ‘mother,’ as well as broader debates on women’s citizenship. This research has grown out of my doctoral dissertation, which was awarded the 2024 LASA Award for Best Dissertation in the Southern Cone Studies Section.
“Poetic Discipleship and Traición in Julián Herbert’s Álbum Iscariote”
This article examines the production of Mexican poetry and its relationship to the creation of a specifically ‘Mexican’ culture, as it is portrayed in Julián Herbert’s collection of poetry, Álbum Iscariote. Throughout the poemario, Herbert questions his pertinence to a contemporary Mexican literary tradition due to his status as a middle-aged poet, situated between a young culture he cannot keep up with and an older culture that he critiques. Furthermore, Álbum Iscarioteundermines the possibility of a ‘Mexican’ culture, unchanged by global influences, in a technological age marked by Néstor García Canclini’s hybridization. Due to his inability to fit neatly within the category of ‘Mexican poet’, Herbert situates himself as a Judas Iscariot figure, a committer of traición against his profession and his country.
Published in A contracorriente: una revista de estudios latinoamericanos.
“The Precarious in the Cinemas of the Americas”
A review of The Precarious in the Cinemas of the Americas, a edited collection by Constanza Burucúa and Carolina Sitnisky, published in October 2018 in Imagofagia.
“Trauma, Memory and Confinement: (Re)presentations of Space in Dictatorial Cinema”
A collaborative Scalar publication with Leticia Treviño, M.A. Our project examines the cinematic (re)presentations of spaces of confinement under the Argentinean military junta (1976-83) and Spanish Francoist dictatorship.
“Mask-ulinity and Feminicide: Argentine Collective Activism During Covid-19”
This blog post for the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA examines the way Argentine feminist activists responded to the increase in feminicides during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Reclaimed Histories: On Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s The Adventures of China Iron”
A review in the LA Review of Books of the Argentine novel The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated from the Spanish by Fiona Mackintosh and Iona Macintyre.
“Sacrificial Motherhood and Bodily Autonomy”
This article uses la Difunta Correa, an Argentine folk saint, as a lens to examine norms of maternity. The medium of Chilean artist Marcela Correa’s sculpture La Difunta Correa (2014) associates la Difunta’s sacrificial motherhood with a national tradition of exploitation and an agro-export economy.
Published in the Los Angeles Review of Books’ PubLab