Humanities Division
Professor and Chair
Faculty
Latin American & Latino Studies
Kresge College
Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas
Humanities Building 1
Humanities 1 530
Monday: 11:30-12:30 or Wednesday 2-3pm. All via zoom and by appointment only. Please email me.
Humanities Academic Services
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.
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.
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.
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.
BOOKS AND MONOGRAPHS
