Comparative Literature

Alexandra Algaze González

alexandra_algaze_gonzalez@brown.edu
Research Interests Latinx literature and pop culture, 20th/21st-century Caribbean literature and culture, poetics and aesthetics, obscenity and vulgarity, gendered trauma and affect, critical theory, queer studies, reggaetón, pornography, class, gender, and sexuality

Biography

Alex Algaze González is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. Her dissertation research focuses on aesthetics and ethics in Latinx pop culture.  Specifically, she examines reggaetón for what it can tell us about the generative and restrictive functions of genre and gender in matters of sexuality, race, class, and taste. Her dissertation explores how queer Latinidad and Caribbeaness comprises aesthetic strategies that sidestep an assimilatory respectability politics, such as the use of vulgarity and obscene excess in a poetics that perverts (hetero)normativity.

Alex has a forthcoming book-chapter titled: “A Motherless World: Temporality, Motherhood, and Afro-Caribbean Writing” in Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability. Eds. Jennifer Gómez Menjívar and Hector Nicolás Ramos Flores. Pitt Latin American Series – University of Pittsburgh Press. (20 December 2022).

Alex is from Puerto Rico, and she misses alcapurrias and bacalaítos.

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)

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