Department of Spanish and Portuguese

I seek to present research that brings binaries into grayscale and illuminates the places where image and text demonstrate the counterpoint to hegemonic expectations of the social imaginary. My work focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth Centuries, largely in Spain and Galicia, engaging with interdisciplinary discourses on medicine, sex work, gender representation, and cultural significance. My current book project, tentatively titled Water Women: Reclaiming Erotic Agency through Image in the Transatlantic Nineteenth Century uses New Materialisms to define the relationship between bodies of water and female bodies, subjectivity, and sexuality. A second vertex of my research delves into the interaction of medical or scientific epistemologies and aesthetic or cultural creation. By reading scientific and non-fiction texts for the cultural expression that they contain, I strive to uncover the frictions between expectation, representation, and experience. I believe that investigation of the onset of modernity can do the work of uncovering the roots of today’s paradigms of value, virtue, vice, and aesthetics.

Book Project: Water Women: Reclaiming Erotic Agency through Image in the Transatlantic Nineteenth Century