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 project focused on poetry, landscape, and class in contemporary Venezuela, where I analyze the work of Igor Barreto, Yolanda Pantin and Armando Reverón, among others. I am also articulating a second project on experimental novels and private life in Brazil and Venezuela in the twentieth-century by looking at the texts of Hilda Hilst and Oswaldo Trejo.