I am the Associate Director of the International Studies Institute at the University of New Mexico. My college-level teaching experience includes courses in Latin American culture as well as Spanish and English at all levels of instruction, taught at Rockford University, Earlham College, and the University of Texas at El Paso. From 2021 to 2025, I served as Director of Earlham College’s Border Studies Program, where I taught courses on Latin American and Borderlands cultures and oversaw language programming with an emphasis on creative writing.
My research examines literature and the middle classes as a field of cultural and political inquiry, with particular attention to the ways cultural texts represent economic development, social mobility, citizenship, and social hierarchy in Brazil, Colombia, and the Mexico–US borderlands. I am especially interested in the dialectical relationship between rhetorical and aesthetic strategies in literature and cultural performance and the economic imagination of development in Latin America. My book manuscript, Writing Development: Agonistic Aesthetics and Middle-Class Politics in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, argues that literary and cultural texts shape and reinterpret a genealogy of economic development, producing repertoires of meanings and practices that inform contemporary debates over economic inclusion, citizenship, and the middle class. The project examines, among other questions, the textual traces through which economic growth and anti-poverty policies such as Bolsa Família, Familias en Acción, and Prospera are registered and contested.
Alongside this work, I am developing projects on Pan-Americanism, reading practices and policies in Latin America, and the archive of Chilean scholar Eduardo Neale-Silva, the principal biographer of Colombian novelist José Eustasio Rivera. These projects extend my broader interest in how literature, archives, and institutions participate in the production of cultural authority, access to culture and education, and competing visions of the Americas.
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.