I am the Director of the Spanish Language Program at Border Studies at Earlham College. I teach 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.
If you share any of these research or teaching topics, please feel free to contact me.