ON LEAVE 2026-27
I research and teach at the intersections of critical theory and literary studies, with a focus on Argentina. My work engages queer theory with Luso-Hispanic literature to examine how colonial taxonomies of difference shaped gendered and sexualized constructions of the body. I analyze how nineteenth- and twentieth-century patriarchal structures informed literary, scientific, and artistic practices and their reception. More broadly, my research critiques how Western medicine and law produced binary systems of corporeal classification—male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, able/disabled, civilized/colonial—that denied minorities full human status while sustaining colonial political assemblages.
My book manuscript, "Buenos Aires’ Velvet Siege: Queer Invasions in the Literary Cosmopolis (1880–1930)" examines how cultural production at the turn of the century imagined Buenos Aires as a city under erotic siege, where modernization unfolded as a drama of intrusion and defense. While urban cultural histories of Buenos Aires often portray its modernization as a utopian, heteronormative, and whitening project, this study uncovers a spatial counter-imaginary, one in which queerness overtakes the phallocentric city to remake it. At the juncture of queer and architectural theory, and Latin American performance and cultural studies, the book introduces the concept of abject glamour to describe how three paradigmatic figures of the literary archive (the European immigrant, the lumpen, and the cosmopolitan queer celebrity) were fictionalized as seductive invaders threatening the city’s heteronormative, racial, and national borders. Across a corpus of canonical novels, pulp fiction, leaflets, popular theatre, tango lyrics, and scandalous press coverage, including the sensational receptions of Vaslav Nijinsky (1913) and Josephine Baker (1929), queers, lumpens, and parvenus are considered in this research as architectural sorcerers, enchanting buildings with erotic excess and unsettling the moral geometry of mansions, salons, theatres, opera houses, tenements, shipyards, slums, brothels, and cabarets. Their affective power over materials, including marble, glass, velvet, mud, brick, tin, and wood, suggests a fantasy of queerness as architectural alchemy, capable of reconfiguring the city’s class, racial, gendered, and sexual grids. Buenos Aires’ Velvet Siege offers a new framework for understanding the intersections of literature, performance, affect, migration, and urbanism in Latin America. It addresses a critical lacuna in the scholarship by foregrounding architecture as a medium of queer world-making, and by positioning erotic deviance as foundational to the spatial imagination of Global South literary cultures.
I teach courses on Realism, the social history of love in the Hispanic tradition, modern Argentine theatre and prose, and fin de siècle LGBTQ literatures. My work on queer space, decadence, global sexology, and the history of the Latin American novel has appeared in Latin American Theater Review, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Taller de Letras, Symposium, Universidad Nacional de la Plata, Palgrave Macmillan, and Himpar. I received the LASA Carlos Monsiváis Best Article of the Sexualities Section and the Canadian Hispanic Association Essay Prize (2022). I received the LASA Sexualities Section Carlos Monsiváis Award for Best Article and the Canadian Association of Hispanists Essay Prize (2022). I hold a PhD in Luso-Hispanic Studies and Critical Theory from Northwestern University and an MA in History from the University of British Columbia. Prior to my arrival at the University of Chicago, I was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow with the European Commission at the University of Cologne, Germany. I have also held fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (University of Toronto, 2021–2023), the Erich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies (Cologne, 2022), the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin, and the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.