Comparative Literature Program

My interests in literatures of the Spanish-speaking world are broad and comparative in nature. Mostly I teach 20th and 21st century Latin American literature within multidisciplinary contexts. My research focuses on Asian and African literature in Spanish.

My novel As Green as Paradise was favorably compared in a recent review to One Hundred Years of Solitude. So that was pretty cool. If you'd like to check out the review, the first half of it is available (in Spanish) at http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/hispania/v095/95.2.badajoz.html.

My second academic book, The Magellan Fallacy: Globalization and the Emergence of Asian and African Literature in Spanish, came out last fall. It's shiny.

My first academic book, Specters of Conquest: Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic Literatures, likewise has an impressive sounding subtitle. More fun beach reading. After a bunch of chapters focused on Columbus, a Mayan epic, an African novel in Spanish, Robinson Crusoe, and a Pynchon novel, it ends by suggesting that Frankenstein is the great American novel. And that Woody Guthrie was right.

I also teach and write about music by singer-songwriters such as Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. Needless to say, I am from New Jersey.

During my increasingly less itinerant life, I have taught courses on subjects of which somewhere I have photos. Probably in sepia by now. Such subjects include modern Mexican/Mexican-American literature, indigenous/indigenista literature, literature and human rights, contemporary Latin American novels, Afro-Hispanic literature, Asian and African literature in Spanish, Caribbean literature in Spanish, Andean literature, ghosts in modern Latin American literature, surveys of modern Latin American literature, and literary theory. Once upon a time I was a not particularly good professor of Chinese social history at a Mexican university, and once upon a time I covered a hostage crisis in Peru for a Japanese newspaper. I remain available anytime to give my opinion on the Philadelphia Eagles.

I work in the Program in Comparative Literature as well as the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. I seem to be the only faculty member at Georgetown researching primarily the Philippines. If you know anything about Filipino culture, please feel free to come to my office and teach me. Coffee's on me. Well, on the Spanish department. Um, and it's instant coffee. But do come by.