Full collection of essays written during my undergraduate and graduate studies in literature.

Vanessa Ceia’s talk features her project, “Mapping the Movida,” which visualizes the Movida, a sociological phenomenon and cultural renaissance that emerged in Madrid during the first decade of Spanish democracy (1976-1986). Ceia demonstrates how combining the use of digital tools and deep mapping techniques with traditional archival resea…[Read more]

This is a paper that I presented at the 2019 MLA in Chicago. In this paper I situate discussions of the field of Iberian Studies within the context of the crisis of the Humanities and the future of Cultural Studies.

This is a paper that I presented at the 2019 MLA in Chicago. In this paper I situate discussions of the field of Iberian Studies within the context of the crisis of the Humanities and the future of Cultural Studies.

In light of (re)new(ed) interest in focusing interdisciplinary scholarly attention on the history of capitalism – a focus captured in Edward Baptist’s recent book, The Half has Never Been Told – this essay reads Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy as a key text for considering the history of capitalism as central to conceptions of circum-…[Read more]

Short paper presented for MLA 2019 Session 417 – “Critical Computation: What’s Next?”

In La colmena, Camilo José Cela places his characters in an environment of fragmentation and vigilance that reproduces the Franco regime’s desire for authoritarian control, bolstered by harsh laws that encouraged vigilance among its citizens. Though Cela once likened the workings of his novel to the intricate gears of a clock, one character, th…[Read more]

This course was first taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall 2018.
It addresses feminism, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and critical race and ethnic studies in conjunction with translation studies.

Review of James Cook, Alexander Kolassa, and Adam Whittaker, eds.
Recomposing the Past: Representations of Early Music on Stage and
Screen. Ashgate Screen Music Series. New York and London:
Routledge, 2018. xii, 259 pp. ISBN: 9781138287471 (hardback).

In this article, I argue that Margaret Cavendish uses ‘Sociable Letters’ and the female friendship within its pages to intervene in early modern epistolary traditions and negotiate alternatives for conventional markers of intimacy between correspondents. Grounding the argument in current scholarly debates on familiar letter conventions, I…[Read more]

In his fiction, journalism and letters, Dostoevsky recurrently mentions ethnicity of his protagonists. Russians, Poles, Englishmen, Germans, Turks, Greeks etc. never act as individuals with their personal life but rather as ‘carriers’ of some national idea. Amidst the nations represented in Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, there are some Jews. The fashi…[Read more]

The silent film era, usually defined as 1895-1927, coincided with a revival of belief in spiritualism in America. Desperate to find meaning in the deaths of the Great War and the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, the bereaved sought contact with the dead and evidence of an afterlife. Given this fascination with spiritualism, it is not surprising that the…[Read more]