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About MeStarting this fall, I will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
My current research focuses on early modern Iberian theater with a particular focus on its ideological function, along with its role in the intellectual history of the West. My vehicle for this research is the theatrical wild figure (avoiding the gendered “wild man”), which is a revealing obsession in the theater of the period that dramatizes anxieties central to the cultural identity of Baroque Spain. I also work on monstrosity, gender performance, and the history and philosophy of science. My research shapes my teaching and vice versa. I try to provide students with historical context and critical approaches to literature that encourage them to engage with the complexities of the works we are reading. I select topics that can be explored from interdisciplinary perspectives in order to reach students of diverse interests, and guide them to productive research questions related to their specific field of study, be it in Spanish language, literature and culture or another discipline. As a result, it is my hope that these strategies motivate students to apply the analytical tools they develop in my course to their own contexts and perspectives. Monsters and their cultural function tends to be a productive theme to achieve such a goal. |