I am a scholar of Latin American, Latinx, and hemispheric American literary studies—especially in comparative contexts. My primary research areas are poetry and poetics, translation, and avant-garde movements and networks. I work across two eras: the 1960s and 1970s, and the return to and reverberations of those pivotal decades in the present day.

Current Book Project

Radical Re/Turns: Poetics of Translation in the Latin American Long Sixties

This project chronicles the revitalization of the avant-garde and the parallel generation of new translation itineraries across the Latin American “long sixties” (1959-1973). I examine collaborative poetry-based art practices imagined for immediate intervention, focusing on art collectives, poetry movements, literary magazine spaces, and publishing networks. I situate them in the context of the anti-imperialist revolutionary imperative and the inter-American Cold War. Chapters move between Caracas, Lima, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Santiago, with Havana and Washington D.C. constantly in view. The book proposes a new theory of the neo-avant-garde, generates new methodologies for tracing translation in and across literary texts, reads long ‘60s inter-America differently, and contributes to our understanding of an era that is increasingly relevant to the crises, inequities, and social awakenings we live through today.

Scholarly Publications

Abstract: From 1968 to 1969 the Argentine modernist Juan Gelman invented and translated into Spanish a contemporary from the United States, named Sidney West, who wrote about small-town mid-American life. Traducciones III: Los poemas de Sidney West (Translations III: The Poems of Sidney West) is a pseudotranslation—a text disguised as a translation that in fact has no corresponding original. While most critics identify Gelman’s recourse to pseudotranslation as a personal undertaking, this essay examines the

experiment for the first time within the inter-American Cold War context of the 1960s, locating pseudo/translation as an in/subordinate poetic protocol particularly well-equipped for intervening in the soft-power mechanisms of U.S. cultural imperialism—in ways that are both treasonous and collaborative. This essay recovers the anti-imperialist politics of the West poems, expands conversations on translation in Gelman’s poetry and proposes pseudo/translation as a new, bifocal mode of reading for texts that forge cross-cultural contact.

Review Essay:

New Visibilities in Latin American Translation Studies. Chasqui, vol. 52, no. 2, 2023.

Books Reviewed:

  • Cleary, Heather. The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction. Bloomsbury, 2021.

  • Gómez, Isabel C. Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America. Northwestern UP, 2023.

  • Kripper, Denise. Narratives of Mistranslation: Fictional Translators in Latin American Literature. Routledge, 2023.

Excerpt: The notion of the translator’s invisibility has been a staple in modern translation studies since Lawrence Venuti first theorized it in his monumental book The Translator’s Invisibility (1995). For Venuti, invisibility describes the translator’s situation within U.S. and British literary cultures, referring to both the translator’s systemic marginalization and the entrenched cultural preference for “transparent” literary translations that mask their status as such. Invisible translation, Venuti argues, is linked to xenophobia, imperialism, and English-language hegemony. In contrast, these three much-anticipated monographs explore what happens when translation is rendered radically visible and when those who practice it take center stage. (continue reading via the link above)

Journal Article:

In (Dis)Use of Reason: Abjection Poetics and Macrocephalic Modernity in El Techo de la Ballena. Revista Hispánica Moderna, vol. 74, no. 2, 2022, pp. 22-39.

Abstract: This article studies poetry from the Venezuelan neo-avant-garde collective, El Techo de la Ballena (1961-1969). Inspired by the Cuban Revolution and in opposition to local social-political conditions, the balleneros developed a radical aesthetic project meant to transfigure the avant-garde into an actual weapon for revolutionary struggle. While most scholarship focuses on the group’s visual arts, the predominant theory linking El Techo’s poetics and politics remains Ángel Rama’s “el terrorismo en las artes” (1966), which highlights provocation, aggressivity, and reader ambush. In this essay, I offer a new approach to ballenero poetry. In considering two key works, Juan Calzadilla’s Dictado por la jauría (1962) and Caupolicán Ovalles’s En uso de razón (1963), I examine what I call “abjection poetics”—the deliberate cultivation of slippage between imposed social limits through abject imagery and expression and the resulting political ramifications. I argue that abjection serves as the primary means through which the poets endeavor to

destabilize the matrices of power that characterized early 1960s Venezuela, a moment of “macrocephalic” modernity—the physical and rhetorical execution of rapid, uneven modernization and the strategic ordering of the body politic. Calzadilla’s and Ovalles’s poetry drive the abject into the innerworkings of the developmentalist agenda in order to disrupt its visual, performative, and discursive execution and, in turn, demystify its claims to reason.

Forthcoming Publications:

The Battle of Legibility [Special Forum Essay on the 2023 PEN Manifesto on Literary Translation, MLN] Just published!

Excerpt: Mapping Spaces of Translation in Twentieth-Century Latin American Print Culture sets out with an ambitious task: to map the intersection of translation and print culture in contemporary Latin America. María Constanza Guzmán Martínez does so from a broad, transnational scope, charting networks and comparative landscapes. Through methodological contributions, theoretical inquiry, and case study analysis, she argues for the centrality of translation in print culture, reclaiming it as “a key site in the formation of Latin American thought” (2). What accompanies this claim is a careful contextualization of translation as contested terrain inseparable from geopolitics. (continue reading via the link above)

Works In-Progress:

Daniel Borzutzky’s Translation-Based Hemispheric Poetics [Under Review]

Structures in Movement: Repeating Ulises Carrión in the 21st Century [Under Review]

Selected Recent Public-Facing Writing

Upcoming Conference Papers

Harmonized Systems: Poetic Rewriting and the Hauntings of Neoliberal Capitalism in Recent Visual-Documentary Poetry. Latin American Studies Association, Bogotá, Colombia, June 2024.

Urayoán Noel’s Neo-Broke Translational Poetics of Counter-Conquest. American Comparative Literature Association, Montreal, Canada, March 2024.

Transhemispheric Necropolitics in Daniel Borzutzky’s Lake Michigan. Modern Languages Association (MLA), Philadelphia, PA, January 2024.

Selected Recent Conference Papers & Panels

Documentary Poetics of the Hemispheric Americas. Seminar co-organized with Whitney DeVos. American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Chicago, IL, March 2023.

Roque Dalton’s Documentary Poetics. American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Chicago, IL, March 2023.

Integral Poetry and Racialized Popular Overflow in Enrique Verástegui’s En los extramuros del mundo (1971). Modern Languages Association (MLA), Virtual Panel, January 2023.

Repeating Avant-Garde: Mapping Modern and Contemporary Constellations of Peru’s Movimiento Hora Zero. Expanded Poetry: The Poetics and Politics of Repetition, Virtual Conference hosted by the University of Porto (Portugual), November 2022.

“Romper el bloqueo cultural”: Translation and Counterculture in Mexico’s El Corno Emplumado. Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Virtual Conference, May 2021.