Affiliated Faculty

Summary of Expertise

Nineteenth century Latin America and contemporary Latino American (US-Latin America) culture. The first focuses on the study of literature as a disciplinary discourse for the formation of national subjects, as a set of social practices and as product in the cultural market. The second deals with Latin/o America in times of globalization in both Latin American and Latino Studies and connects different discourses (literature, film, popular culture forms) with the question of citizenship and belonging in transnational contexts.

Latin(o) American national literatures; transnational/global cultures (literature, radio, film); Latin(o) American cultural studies; 19th-century studies; the history of reading practices; migration and citizenship.

Research Interests

My research is both wide-ranging and focused on several key ideas, organized by two axes. The first axis is the tension between homogeneity and heterogeneity at national and transnational levels. Nations have a history of internal homogenization and unification efforts, along with intra-national struggles that resist such efforts, and external claims of differentiation in an inter-national context defined by its own processes of homogenization, whether imperial, hegemonic or global. I study the cultural fields, cultural objects, and cultural dynamics that result from these tensions, focusing primarily on Chile and the United States in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

A second, complementary research axis is the distinction between formality and informality, relative inclusion and relative exclusion in cultural and political dynamics of consumption, participation, and representation. I have worked on issues such as access to rights and pragmatic accommodation under conditions of subalternity, as in formal and informal education or ways of reading; full or limited forms of citizenship and labor; originality, translation, and imitation in postcolonial contexts; the emergence of mass mediated popular culture; and piracy in unequal geopolitical locations.

Methodologically, I work with several concepts involved in processes of nation formation and transnational developments. First, concepts of national culture and national literature as disciplinary discourses for the formation of national subjects, sets of social practices, and products in the cultural market. Second, reading and the history of reading and, more broadly, cultural production and consumption under national and transnational dynamics. Finally, field defining concepts such as area and ethnic studies, national and transnational cultures, citizenship and belonging, popular culture, cultural studies, Latin American and Latino Studies.

Biography, Education and Training

I am Chilean-American, with a Licenciatura from the Universidad de Chile and a Ph.D. from Duke University. I generally focus on the question of literature as discourse in national and transnational contexts: what kind of experience does it provide, for whom, to what personal, cultural, and political effects? This involves the history of literary and cultural studies, the history of reading and the book as both technologies and social practices; the history of citizenship and migration; and the emergence of different forms of non-quasi-limited citizenship.

Selected Publications

BOOKS AND MONOGRAPHS

• 2021 Co-editor with an Introduction and a chapter (co-edited with Sylvanna M. Falcón, Steve McKay, Catherine S. Ramírez, and      Felicity Amaya Schaeffer), Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Non-citizenship, Rutgers University Press.
• 2020 Co-editor (with Victor Goldgel), Piracy and Intellectual Property in Latin America: Rethinking Creativity and the Common Good, London: Routledge.
• 2019 Hacia una historia de la lectura y la pedagogía literarias en América Latina, Santiago, Cuarto Propio. 
• 2019 La Escritura de Pedro Lemebel como proyecto cultural y político, Santiago, Cuarto Propio.
• 2017 Editor with an Introduction: New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power, London: Routledge.
• 2015 Co-editor with Héctor Fernández L'Hoeste and Robert Irwin), Sports and Nationalism in Latin America, New York:Palgrave.
• 2015 Co-editor (with Juana Suárez), Humor in Latin American Cinema, New York: Palgrave.
• 2010 Co-editor (with Fernando Blanco), Desdén al infortunio: Sujeto, comunicación y público en la narrativa de Pedro Lemebel, Santiago: Cuarto Propio.
• 2009 Co-Editor (with Beatriz Gonzalez-Stephan), Andres Bello, Serie Críticas, Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana.
• 2009 Co-Editor (with Héctor Fernández-L' Hoeste). Redrawing the Nation: National Identities in Latin American Comics, Palgrave.
• 2003 Literatura chilena del siglo XIX: entre públicos lectores y figuras autoriales. (Nineteenth Century Chilean Literature: Between Reading Publics and Authorial Figures), Editorial Cuarto Propio, Chile.
• 2003 Editor with an Introduction: Critical Latin American and Latino Studies, University of Minnesota Press.
• For ARTICLES IN PROFESSIONAL JOURNALS AND BOOK CHAPTERS, see my website.

Teaching Interests

Latin(o) American national literatures; transnational/global cultures (literature, radio, film); Latin(o) American cultural studies; 19th-century studies; the history of reading practices; migration and citizenship.