Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese

My research focuses primarily on narratives of capitalist modernity and modernization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America.  My first book, Capital Fictions:  The Literature of Latin America's Export Age (Minnesota, 2013), studied how literature represented the incorporation of the region's economies into world commodity markets at the end of the nineteenth century.  My current book project, tentatively titled "Agrarian Questions:  Latin American Literature in the Age of Development," examines how twentieth-century literary fiction by authors such as, Rosario Castellanos, Juan Rulfo, José Donoso and José María Arguedas, registered capitalist transitions in the countryside, primarily in relation to three overlapping processes:  agricultural commercialization and mechanization, urban out-migration, and land reform.