Department of Comparative Literature

I study the Spanish-Caribbean, continental Caribbean, and Brazil, specifically how the cultural expressions (literature, film, music) from these areas are immersed, or resist to be immersed, in a cosmopolitan logic which translates and creates a simplified structure of critical reception for them. My work engages with a long tradition of Latin American thought as well as continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology, examining questions of high and low art, the idea of the popular, the hyper and translocal, and the intellectual life of minoritized subjects. I have published on social theorist Alejandro Moreno and on Afro-Venezuelan music. Currently, I am working on a book project focused on Venezuelan poetry and the critique of interiority; and a long essay centered around Igor Barreto and the destruction and re-composition of the landscape in relation to other Latin American poets. In parallel, I continue to research on Afro-Latin drums and the voices and chants that accompany them.