About

Elena Machado Sáez is a Professor of English at Bucknell University, where she teaches courses on contemporary American, US Latinx, and Caribbean diaspora literatures. She earned her PhD in English at SUNY Stony Brook and her undergraduate degree in English at Fordham University. She also completed a certification offered by the International Inside-Out Instructor Training Institute at Temple University.

Dr. Machado Sáez’s current research project is on activism and US Latinx theater. She has published several essays about Lin-Manuel Miranda including, “Debt of Gratitude: Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Politics of US Latinx Twitter,”  in archipelagos, “Blackout on Broadway: Affiliation and Audience in In the Heights and Hamilton” in Studies in Musical Theater, and “Bodega Sold Dreams: Middle-Class Panic and the Crossover Aesthetics of In the Heights” in Dialectical Imaginaries: Materialist Approaches to U.S. Latino/a Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (2018).

She is author of Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction (University of Virginia Press 2015). The book analyzes historical fiction by Caribbean diasporic authors in Britain, Canada and the United States as part of a global literary trend that addresses the relationship between ethnic writers and their audiences. Machado Sáez argues that the novels address the problematic of intimacy and ethics in relation to readership by focusing on how gender and sexuality represent sites of contestation in the formulation of Caribbean identity and history.

Dr. Machado Sáez is also coauthor of The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2007), which discusses how Cuban-American, Dominican-American, and Puerto Rican literatures challenge established ideas about the relationship between politics and the market.