My interests are broad and comparative in nature. Mostly I teach 20th and 21st century Latin American literature, film and music within global contexts. As a researcher and writer, however, I am working now in Taiwan Studies. My work in this field includes my recent article "Cry for Me, Argentina! Taiwanese Soap Opera Diplomacy in Latin America" (published in the Philippine journal Kritika Kultura). Preceding efforts of mine in Taiwan Studies include "Translating Taiwan Southward," an essay that argues for comparative Taiwanese/Philippine cultural studies (published in the volume Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context), and an essay on the writer San Mao titled "On the Third Hand: Why to taiwan World Literature" (published in the Taiwanese journal Ex-position).
I came to Taiwan Studies after working for a number of years on Philippine topics, where I attempted such projects as a lengthy investigation of literature in Spanish by Filipinas. That essay included my first attempt at analyzing a cookbook and my first sustained attempt at doing some kind of feminist analysis.
I like doing creative writing as well as academic, and my novel As Green as Paradise was compared in a review to One Hundred Years of Solitude. So that was pretty cool. If you'd like to check out the review, the first half of it is available here in Spanish .
My second academic book, The Magellan Fallacy: Globalization and the Emergence of Asian and African Literature in Spanish, won the A-Asia/ICAS Africa-Asia prize, a worldwide competition for the best book written in English, French or Portuguese between 2009 and 2015 on any topic linking Africa and Asia. I am grateful for the positive reception of the book at the A-Asia conference in Ghana.
My third academic book, Subversions of the American Century: Filipino Literature in Spanish and the Transpacific Transformation of the United States, makes for great beach reading, especially the index, which features Bon Jovi and Zod. Rather less entertaining is my first academic book, Specters of Conquest: Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic Literatures, though it does mention Gilligan's Island twice. So there's that.
In 2017, I received the Distinguished Achievement in Research Award from Georgetown.
Teaching is a central part of my work at Georgetown. I try to make my courses open-ended experiences in which each student can make it meaningful to themselves in their own way, so that all of us learn in conversation with each other. I hope that students will realize by the last day of a semester that the world is a much larger place than they had thought it was the first day of the semester, and that they are less certain in their knowledge of it as a result. And I hope that they then take that experience and go out in the world bolstered by it, and bolster the world in turn.
When possible, I teach and write about music by singer-songwriters such as Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. Needless to say, I'm from New Jersey. Once upon a time I taught Chinese history at a Mexican university. And once upon a time, I helped cover a hostage crisis in Peru for a Japanese newspaper. In college, long ago, I majored in U.S. History and Literature, and after grad school I focused on West African literature. Then I became really interested in the Philippines, and now I am trying to learn more about Taiwan. So that's basically the kind of Latin Americanist I am, for better or for worse.
In the current Fall 2025 semester, I am teaching a seminar on Asian and African literature created in Spanish, and a seminar on the intersections of human rights and Latin American literature, film and music.
So, on that note…if you know anything about Taiwanese cultures, please feel free to come to my office and teach me. I would like that very much.
Academic Appointment(s)
- Primary
- Professor, College - Department of Spanish and Portuguese