Biography
I am a scholar of global modernism, specializing in twentieth-century US and Latin American literatures, with a particular interest in the ways modern poetry responds to other media and popular forms.
My dissertation, “American Screens: Poets Revisioning the Hemisphere through Cinema, 1918–1939,” examines how poets throughout the Americas responded to Hollywood between the world wars. Combining readings of literature and film with archival research, I analyze four writers whose work engages with cinema in hitherto underexamined ways: Salvador Novo (Mexico), Hilda Mundy (Bolivia), Nicolás Olivari (Argentina), and Langston Hughes (US). Departing from typical approaches to the literature-cinema nexus, I show how these writers apprehend movies primarily in terms of genre, using poems and screenplays to intervene in the mass-cultural imagination and rethink dominant ideas of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation. This project has been supported by a Mellon Foundation dissertation completion fellowship, a Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship, and grants from the University of Chicago Humanities Division and English Department.
More broadly, my research and teaching interests include modern poetry and poetics, race and US culture, classical Hollywood cinema, Mexican cinema, and comparative literatures of the Americas.
I am also an editor, translator, and poet. From 2023 to 2026, I served as the nonfiction editor of Chicago Review. For the 2026–27 academic year, I am the co-coordinator with Belén Sánchez of the UChicago Workshop on Hemispheric Studies of the Americas.
Recent Publications
“A Crotch, a Frying Pan, a Poet, a Shoulder: The Comedy of César Vallejo,” Annulet Poetics Journal, no. 11, 2026
“Textos recobrados de Hilda Mundy,” La Mariposa Mundial, 2025 – an edited folio of 10 previously lost texts by Bolivian avant-garde writer Hilda Mundy (in Spanish; translation in preparation)
“Amusing One’s Self: Lydia Tomkiw’s Palindromes,” Chicago Review 66, no. 2, 2025
4 poems from Línea by Gilberto Owen, mercury firs, no. 8, 2026
6 poems from Línea by Gilberto Owen, Asymptote, Summer 2025
3 poems from Línea by Gilberto Owen, La Lancha, New Mundo Press, 2025