Comparative Literature

I research sound and media aesthetics in Latinx music and performance cultures. Specifically, I use Latinx urban music as a means to examine politico-aesthetic questions about class and taste in our imaginings of Latinidad. I am especially interested in how taste informs sexuality and gender, language and race, sound and performance, and place-making for Latines. For this reason, I focus on vulgarity—as a poetic device, a politic, and an aesthetic technique—in a working-class Latinx ethics: vulgarity as expressed in vernacular language, sound, and movement. In my research, I am particularly attentive to how femme queer Latines deploy the “vulgar” or “excessive" and to what ends.

I have a published chapter titled "A Motherless World: Temporality, Motherhood, and Afro-Caribbean Writing" in Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability (UPitt Press).

My article, "The Artistry of Aesthetic Trash: The Vulgar Poetics of Sex and Latinidad in Reggaetón (Or: Someone’s Aesthetic Trash is Another’s Global Commodity)” is forthcoming in Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures

Education:

B.A. in Foreign Languages, Universidad de Puerto Rico-Río Piedras, 2008
M.S. in International Relations, Università di Bologna, 2014
M.A. in Hispanic Literatures Cultures, and Linguistics, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, 2017

Languages:

English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch (beginning)