critic
historian
translator
organizer
I am associate professor of Comparative Humanities and affiliate faculty in Latin American Studies at Bucknell University where I teach the history of ideas focused on the Global South.
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I study the political economy of culture in Latin America.
My first book, Study Without Ends: Aesthetic Education in Neoliberal Latin America, focuses on the reproduction of humanist knowledge systems in the Southern Cone in the late 20th and early 21st centuries through the idea of the university and its crises, the literary-critical system, and the institutionalization of theory as they relate to the neoliberal experimentation that has characterized the region since the coups d'état of the early 1970s. My current project, The Informal: Cultural Infrastructures of the Americas, analyzes case studies drawn from visual art, film, literature, architecture, urbanism, tourism, and cultural policy in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and the United States to show how restricted cultural production in the neoliberal era institutes among elites an aesthetics of informality, a new common sense that lionizes negative liberty at the same time that it naturalizes inequality, precarity, and insecurity.
My research interests span 20th- and 21st-century Latin American social and cultural texts, especially in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico; late 18th- through 20th-century German-language philosophy and history of ideas, especially aesthetic and critical theory; cultural materialisms; sociologies of culture; critical university studies; and cultural policy studies.
I am the English-language translator of Chilean philosopher Willy Thayer’s The Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University, an intellectual touchstone of Chile’s post-dictatorship period that was re-editioned in the wake of the country’s 2011 student protest movement. For many years I co-edited LÁPIZ, the journal of the Latin American Philosophy of Education Society—a collective of teachers, scholars, and activists that promotes emancipatory teaching and learning practices from across the Americas. I also served on the faculty editorial board of the Bucknell University Press until its untimely closure in 2026.
In addition to my work as a researcher, writer, translator, editor, and educator, I am an organizer with over a decade experience in the higher education sector: first, as a founding member of Cornell Graduate Students United, later, as a co-founder of the pandemic-era online soldiarity coordinator University Workers United for a Fair Future , and most recently as a co-founder AAUP Bucknell and the organization's first secretary upon its rechartering in June 2023.
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