Associate Professor (Profesora Titular), Spanish and Portuguese
Fulbright Scholar Liaison, IUB & IUNW campuses
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, 2024-2025
On Research Leave during 2024-2025
My main area of research is 20th- and 21st- century Spanish literature and culture, focusing specifically on five areas: García Lorca studies, memory studies, gender and sexuality, textual scholarship and editorial theory, and archival studies. I approach literature as an intervention in ongoing cultural debates; as such, my scholarship most often requires multi-disciplinary research. It also often involves a heavy component of archival research, with an aim to offering new perspectives on original materials and changing our visions of a work, an artist, an issue, or a moment. My first book is a reconstruction, literary-critical study, and experimental critical edition of Lorca's posthumous poetic collection, Suites; my editorial work on Suites was also included in three important U.S. bilingual editions of Lorca. In 2020, I curated a major museum exhibit on Suites at the Centro Federico García Lorca in Granada, bringing the book to a wider public. You can access the exhibit virtual tour and my monograph Suites y el viaje de la percepción / Suites and the Voyage of Perception on the Centro Lorca website. I’ve recently published Lorca y el archivo: Diálogos con el porvenir (Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2024), a multi-disciplinary edited volume that considers the intersection of Lorca and archive from both theoretical and practical perspectives and includes chapters by literary scholars, librarians, archivists, curators and art historians.
For the past four years, I’ve also been working on a large scale, collaborative exhibit and a related digital humanities project on archival histories and García Lorca. Co-curated with Andrew A. Anderson (U of Virginia) and Christopher Maurer (Boston University), the bilingual Spanish-English exhibit Lorca and the Archive: Memory in Motion opened in December 2024 at the Centro Lorca in Granada and will run through May 11, 2025. Based on new research, its five chapters tell for the first time the story of the Lorca Foundation’s archive since 1936 to the present day. Through 462 pieces -about 70% of which are unedited or rarely seen- from 47 lenders, it sews together never-before-told stories of salvage, discovery, acquisition, loss, and perseverance within the complex political and cultural landscape of each moment. It explores concepts of the archival as well as the contemporary plight of archives in that deal with the Spanish Civil War, dictatorship, and exile. See the Centro Lorca’s website for a description and the free, bilingual hand program, as well as this By-the-Numbers sheet for visitor data, media coverage, lenders, images and more. See Current Projects below for information on the digital humanities project and the book we’ve co-edited, Memory in Motion: Lorca and the Archive, born in dialogue with this exhibit and currently in press.
I’m now on leave during 2024-2025 with an NEH Fellowship, working on my current book project, Mediating Memory: Federico García Lorca and the Legacies of the Past in Democratic Spain. It contends that the modernist writer’s ghostly presence haunts contemporary Spanish politics and society and traces it back to a pivotal moment in the country’s history: its transition to democracy (broadly understood as 1975-1992). Reading Lorca as a symptom of underlying socio-political tensions during the transition, I work with a range of cultural materials to elucidate what I argue are the unacknowledged memorial dynamics inherent in the polemics surrounding Lorca and his work at that time, and therefore the way the legacies of the transitional period continue to haunt contemporary Spain today and evince the dictatorship’s long shadow. This book project also shows that our understanding of Federico García Lorca, both in Spain and internationally, was in many ways forged in the fires of transitional memorial politics and is thus fraught with transitional legacies that still mediate popular and scholarly approaches to Lorca.
In addition to the NEH Fellowship, I was awarded a U.S. Fulbright Senior Scholar Award for Research to work on Mediating Memory in 2019-2020, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid affiliated with the Research Group “Literatura, Heterodoxia y Marginación” that year. I've received a national research award from the Women's Caucus for the MLA for one of my articles and both internal (e.g. College Arts and Humanities Institute, Institute for Advanced Study, President’s Arts and Humanities Awards, Institute for European Studies, Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities) and external fellowships and grants (e.g. Bibliographical Society of America, the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and U.S. Universities).
I teach a range of classes at the undergraduate and graduate levels, most often focusing on issues of power, cultural memory, and gender/sexuality. Examples of recent courses are Cultural Memory and the Negotiation of the Past in Democratic Spain, Contesting Repression: Spanish Fiction from the 1940s-1990s,“Hispanic Film, Master Directors: Almodóvar, del Toro, Amenábar and Iñárritu” and Gender and Hispanic Literature. I've received the IU Trustees Teaching Award twice, the Outstanding Mentor Award from our departmental graduate students, the MIND Award for Impactful Undergraduate Teaching, and have been nominated twice for the Indiana University Distinguished Teaching Awards. I was also granted the state-wide IU teaching award of induction into the Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching. I really enjoy working with students and seeing where their own line of inquiry takes them.
Proyectos Actuales de Investigación
The College of Arts