My research and teaching explore the literary and cultural representation of ideas of economic development, social mobility and citizenship in Brazil, Colombia and the Mexico–US borderlands. Recently I have become interested in the role of reading practices and policies in Latin America and their impact on access to culture and education. I am also involved in a project to unveil the archive of Chilean professor Eduardo Neale-Silva, the main biographer of Colombian author José Eustasio Rivera.
I am currently Assistant Teaching Professor of Spanish and English at Rockford University’s Department of Languages, Philosophy, Religion and Cultures. My teaching experience at the college level includes courses on Latin American culture, Spanish and English at all levels of instruction at Earlham College, University of New Mexico, and University of Texas at El Paso. From 2021 to 2025 I was the director of the Spanish Language Program at the Border Studies Program in Earlham College. I taught classes on Latin American and Borderlands culture and oversight the language programming, with an emphasis on creative writing.
My research and teaching elaborate on the dialectic relationship between rhetorical strategies present in a corpus of cultural performances and novels, and the economic imagination on development in Latin America. My book manuscript Writing Development: Agonistic aesthetics and middle-class politics in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico proposes that these cultural texts shaped and reinterpreted a genealogy of economic development, offering a repertoire of meanings and practices for contemporary public policy in which the concept of middle-class is predominant. Of special interest for me is the textual traces of how the effects of recent growth and anti-poverty public policies (Bolsa Família, Familias en Acción, and Prospera) comment on questions of economic inclusion and citizenship in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.
My paper “Estéticas de la aspiración, políticas de la inclusión: glosas al desarrollo en dos saraus de Rio de Janeiro y Brasilia” was recently published in Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporãnea. Other publications include “Apropiarse de la ciudad: los recursos de la memoria en Guia afetivo da perifería, de Marcus Vinícius Faustini.” (in Otras Modernidades).
I acted as secretary of the Colombia Section of the Latin American Studies Association from until December 2019. I co-founded and edited the Spanish language, border based literary magazine “Revista Coroto“. I was awarded the 2003 “Ciudad de Bogota” Short Story Prize.