About

After graduating with a PhD in English from The University of Notre Dame, I joined UTEP as Assistant Professor in Fall 2007 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013. I teach courses on twentieth and twenty-first century American literatures, with special attention to Chicanx and Latinx literatures and cultures, the Caribbean diaspora, literature of the Americas, and world literature. As an immigrant who grew up near the Austrian-Italian border and as a scholar whose main research interests include Latinx literatures, translation, affect and queer theory, and the relationship between ethnic American literature, historiography, and visual culture, I am excited to live in the US-Mexico borderlands and work with students whose daily lives are characterized by multiple border crossings.

My interdisciplinary collection, Dialogues Across Diasporas: Women Writers, Scholars, and Activists of Africana and Latina Descent in Conversation, co-edited with Sarah E. Ryan, was published by Lexington Books in December 2012 (shorturl.at/ghx24). Haitian Revolutionary Fictions, co-authored and co-edited with Marlene L. Daut and Gregory Pierrot, is dedicated to the translation and contextualization of French, German, Kreyol, Portuguese, Spanish, British, and US-American responses to the Haitian Revolution published between 1787 and 1900 (University of Virginia Press, 2022). I am currently completing Transnational Latinidades, a monograph focused on theorizing and understanding the politics and poetics of translating contemporary Latinx literatures in the European Union. Part of this work in progress was published in Symbolism.

My scholarship has also been published in American Quarterly, Antípodas, Callaloo, El Mundo Zurdo, Latino Studies, MELUS, The European Journal of American Studies, and The Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies. Examples of recent scholarly essays are “Refusing the Referendum: Queer Latino Masculinities and Utopian Citizenship in Justin Torres’ We the Animals” and “Undocumented Magic: Magical Realism as ‘Aesthetic Turbulence’ in Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper.”