General Presentation

I obtained my Ph.D. in Romance Studies at Duke University, arguably one of the most dynamic places for the humanities and the social sciences in the 1990s in the U.S. My B.A. training had a double European base, Spain and Great Britain, U of Salamanca and The University of Wales, Swansea, where I was a first-generation Erasmus student in two crucial years. My specialism is historical dimensions of Latin American and colonial studies bringing connections with the Iberian peninsula inside the European continent.

I hold dialogues with postcolonial, cultural and subaltern studies, “minority” studies (African-American, Black, Latino, etc.). I remain invested in Mannerism and the Baroque periods looking on both sides of the Atlantic, also in relation to neo-Baroque vis-à-vis postmodernism debates. I am invested in expansive “literacy,” critical dimension within postcolonial and cultural studies dealing with multilingual contexts, the impact of the alphabetic letter, the artifact of the book, the visual domain in the arts increasingly functioning in the digital world. I look at the historical preeminence of the European /Western subject in the production of knowledge. To singularize specific national geographies, the Spain – New Spain channel of communication is for me ideal template for the re-articulation of such “Latin” connections vis-à-vis Europe and inevitably the U.S. In contemporary national settings, Mexico and Spain are my two preferred areas of investigation inside the compare-and-contrast articulation of “Latin” and “Anglo” knowledge practices may take place (content, form, function, historiography, etc.).