2023-24 New Faculty

I am a scholar of contemporary Spanish literature and comics, with special interest in historical memory, social movements, and cultural trauma. I am largely interested in how literature and other cultural production informs and is informed by historical and cultural events. My dissertation project, for example, investigated criticisms of neoliberalism in contemporary Spanish comics following the 2008 economic crisis. The economic crisis in Spain has left a lasting mark and has faced scathing criticism in literary and comics circles, the latter of which has experienced a boom in recent decades. In 2022, I published “Dystopian Necropolitics in Arnau Sanz Martínez’s Un fantasma and the Admonitory Role of Contagion Narratives in the COVID-19 Era” with Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, which considered how the recent COVID-19 pandemic in Spain compares to a dystopian graphic novel that was published shortly before the outbreak of COVID-19. How the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain (and globally) informs cultural production is a future direction of my research. I have also published “Liberatory Queer Performance and the Coloniality of Gender in Melibea Obono’s La Bastarda” with Spanish and Portuguese Review in 2020. I am also a Spanish-language educator, and have experience teaching introductory and intermediate Spanish, Spanish grammar, writing & composition, and literature & culture. I am passionate about the full spectrum of language learning, from the most beginner courses to the most advanced courses on literature and cultural studies. I have also had the opportunity to train abroad as a language instructor, earning a 120-hour TEFL certificate from Teacher Training Madrid in Madrid, Spain in 2020.