University of Oregon

Faculty Member, Romance Languages

Other Affiliations: King's College London, American Studies
University of Oregon, Comparative Literature
University of Oregon, Latin American Studies

Assistant Professor

College of Arts and Sciences

About

I work on issues of nationalism and literary approaches to history. For my PhD I concentrated on the literatures of Mexico and the US from the 19th to the 20th century. My Doctoral dissertation was entitled "Dismantling the Nation: History as Satire in the Works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon." In it, I looked at the ways in which these two novelists from clearly different traditions had dealt with official and unofficial histories, and how they were critically engaged with the processes of myth-making that take place in the construction of nationalist discourses. Mexican and American nationalisms are two very interesting and complex cultural discourses whose excesses and contradictions are best understood through a comparatist analysis. I am still currently engaged researching the relations between nationalist discourse and the discourses of progress and modernity as seen by intellectuals and writers in Latin America, the US, and Spain. Intellectual and literary discussions of Hispanidad, Mexicanidad, and Americanness are very often part of the syllabi in the classes I teach both at the undergraduate and the graduate level. I have recently published several articles on the ways in which Spanish writers portrayed Latin America, and Latin American nationalisms, after independence (from the early 19th Century to the 1930s).

Out of my first area of research, the contradictory relations between nationalism and modernity, a second new area has emerged in my latest research: the narratives and literary debates that deal with the industrial and mineral exploitation of the Americas. The literature of mining is a sizable corpus of texts that stage larger debates such as internationalization (of capital as well as labor), globalization, ecology and nature, human exploitation, racism and slavery, and the central issue of national property over the land and access to natural resources through nationalization or through privatization. Concentrating mainly on the post-colonial period, I have already identified an important corpus of literary and cultural texts (including films, songs, and paintings) that address the role of mining in the construction of independent and modern societies in the Americas. I am currently revising a piece on the Gold Rush and the process of expropriation and reclaiming of mineral properties on the US-Mexican border in the mid-nineteenth Century and the folk stories that developed around those debates.

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