College of Humanities People

Visiting Professor
Universidad de Guadalajara
Departamento de Imagen y Sonido
Centro Universitario de Arte, Arquitectura y Diseño (CUAAD), August 2003-May 2004

Assistant Professor
Department of Romance Languages
Bowling Green State University, August 1995-August 2000

Recent Publications

“The Young, the Damned, and the Restless: Youth in Contemporary Mexican Cinema.” Framework 49.1 (Spring 2008).

“Out of Depth: The Politics of Disaffected Youth and Contemporary Latin American Cinema.” In Youth Culture in Global Cinema. Timothy Shary and Alexandra Seibel, eds. Austin: University of Texas Press, December 2006.

"Los globalizados también lloran: Spanish-language Television and the Transnational Narrative." In Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies. Stephen Hart and Richard Young, eds. London: Arnold, 2003.

“De la pantalla: jóvenes y el cine mexicano contemporáneo.” El Ojo que Piensa (www.elojoquepiensa.udg.mx) No. 6 (November 2004).

“Affecting legacies: historical memory and contemporary structures of feeling in Madagascar and Amores perros.” Screen 44.3 (Autumn 2003): 277-294. Republished in Screening World Cinema. Annette Kuhn and Catherine Grant, eds. London: Routledge, 2006.

Co-editor with Tamara Falicov. "Argentine Film and Popular Culture: New Critical Perspectives," Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 21 (2002). Including co-authored "Editor’s Introduction": xi-xii.

Editor of "Cine y literatura," Revista Iberoamericana LXVIII/199 (abril-junio 2002) including introduction “¿Un diálogo entre sordos?”: 247-249.

Project Description

My book, Specular City: Transforming Culture, Consumption, and Space in Buenos Aires, 1955-1973, has been my most substantive attempt to carry out an interdisciplinary, cultural studies project. Through the analysis of new films, literature, magazines, advertising, architecture, and car culture, Specular City discusses the material and discursive transformation of the Argentine capital in relation to contemporary struggles between middle-class and working-class sectors in the aftermath of the first Peronist administration.

I am currently working on a book on contemporary Latin American cinema and the politics of affect. The manuscript explores the evocation and deployment of emotion in contemporary film as a response to the hyper-rationalist discourses of postdictatorial politics and neoliberalism. The project examines the recent documentaries of Fernando Solanas and Patricio Guzman, thrillers about the 1960s and 1970s like O que e isso, companheiro? and Ação entre Amigos; and tales of youthful ennui in recent films like Amores perros and La cienaga, among other things. In the process, the study engages a variety of theoretical models on affect –from Raymond Williams' argument about structures of feeling, to the contributions of trauma studies, to Deleuzian-inspired accounts about "intensities". By placing recent films alongside larger socio-cultural debates, the manuscript will suggest that such affectively-charged articulations register and address epistemological crises accompanying the breakdown of traditional political and social paradigms and call for a rethinking of traditonal conceptualizations of the public sphere.