ABOUT:
I am Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies and World Languages & Cultures at Allegheny College. At Harvard, I have taught in the History & Literature and Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies programs. I received my Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and my B.A. in Spanish & Education from Ithaca College.
RESEARCH:
I am interested in the fields of affect, queer, and critical race theories and US Latinx, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies. My book project, "Aesthetics of Colorblindness: Race & Sex in Latinx Literature," looks to US Latinx cultural production to trace how colorblind social discourse has rendered racial difference mute—as opposed to moot—while conversations of sexuality appear to take its place. I read works by Justin Torres, Carmen María Machado, Manuel Muñoz, and Salvador Plascencia, alongside legal cases like the 1948 miscegenation case Pérez v. Sharp and the 2010 Arizona Anti-Ethnic Studies Act, to argue that Latinx writing does what colorblind law refuses to do by apprehending race and indicting racism in the forms and feelings of queer narratives.
An article on this topic, “Colorblind Aesthetics in Manuel Muñoz: Reading Race in Form and Feeling,” appears in MELUS Journal.
I am also co-editing with Melanie Abeygunawardana “Colorblind: Liberal Racism from Past to Present,” an interdisciplinary anthology that organizes scholarship around pre- and post-Civil Rights iterations of colorblindness; its injurious effects on subjects both within and beyond the Black-white binary, namely Asian American, Indigenous, and Latinx subjects; and its manifestations beyond the bounds of the US. This research has been supported by Sunlit: The Sue-Je Lee Gage Residency for Human Rights and Social Justice.
TEACHING:
Recent courses I have taught at Harvard include HL90-EX: Queer Latinx Borderlands, HL97: Race & Representation in Modern America, and WOMGEN1210: Queer Theory. In conjunction with my seminar HL90-FR: Latinx, 1492 to 2022, I organized the art exhibit "N[eg]ation" by Alán Peláez López at the Smith Center Arts Wing. See more about Alan's installation here.
At the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality, hosted by MIT, I have taught WGS.610: Feminist & Queer Theory.
I have also taught “Latin Lovers: Gender & Sexuality in the Americas” and “Literature of the Displaced” for precollege students with TeenSHARP, led community workshops with Incite Seminars, and shared yoga practices at Puentes de Salud and elsewhere.
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