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 an Assistant Teaching Professor of Spanish and English in Rockford University’s Department of Languages, Philosophy, Religion, and Cultures. My college-level teaching experience includes courses in Latin American culture as well as Spanish and English at all levels of instruction, taught at Earlham College, the University of New Mexico, and the University of Texas at El Paso. From 2021 to 2025, I served as Director of the Spanish Language Program in 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 and teaching examine the dialectical relationship between rhetorical strategies in cultural performances and novels 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 these cultural texts shape and reinterpret a genealogy of economic development, offering a repertoire of meanings and practices that inform contemporary public policy debates in which the concept of the middle class is central. I am particularly interested in the textual traces through which recent economic growth and anti-poverty policies—such as Bolsa Família, Familias en Acción, and Prospera—register and interrogate questions of economic inclusion and citizenship in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.
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.