I was born and raised in Mexico and received my BA (magna cum laude) with Departmental Honors in Philosophy and a Major in Mathematics from Wellesley College, in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1991. From there I went on to live in Europe for several years, mainly Prague, where I taught languages and co-managed a trading company, and briefly in Italy and Portugal. In 1997 I moved to New York to pursue a PhD in Hispanic Literatures at New York University. I received my doctorate in 2003, with a thesis on the question of nationalism in the Mexican and Brazilian avant-garde movements. I was hired by the University of Alberta in 2003, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2009.
Among my personal interests are cooking and capoeira (Brazilian martial arts).
My research areas and interests include:
My current research project, "ecopoesia.com: An Online Resource on Environment & Poetry from Latin America," is funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
TEACHING:
2003-2020: Undergraduate courses designed, redesigned, and/or taught at the U of A
Spanish:
Latin American Studies:
Modern Languages & Cultural Studies:
Comparative Literature:
Honors Students Mentored:
Undergraduate Research Initiative (UARE) International Interns Hosted:
Community Service Learning:
Since 2012, I have incorporated community service-learning (CSL) into my translation courses, SPAN 405 and SPAN 406. In the CSL component, students do projects translating documents for community partners in and receive real life work experience while also earning academic credit.
Education-Abroad Teaching:
In May 2014 and May 2015 I participated as instructor in the University of Alberta’s newly launched e3 in Brazil program. On site in Curitiba, Brazil, I taught the course “LA ST 399: Performing Brazil,” an interdisciplinary introduction to Brazilian culture through the lens of performance. In addition to in-class lectures, discussions, films, and presentations, the course included an experiential learning component in the form of visits to sites and attendance at cultural events. Below is a summary of those experiential learning opportunities:
Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil, 2014
11 Students
2015
Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil, 2014
Learning Technologies Use and Training:
Extra-curricular teaching events organized:
In April 2016 and September 2016 I organized two cooking demos for Spanish and Latin American students where we taught students how to prepare simple Hispanic dishes and discussed their cultural origins.
TEACHING- AND CURRICULUM-RELATED RESEARCH AND PUBLICATIONS:
TEACHING- AND CURRICULUM-RELATED UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION
University Service:
Faculty Service:
Department Service:
Honors:
An introduction to major works of the world's literary heritage, presented in their historical, social, and cultural contexts. Covers the period from the 17th century through the present day. Not open to students with credit in C LIT 100.
Winter Term 2022Translation problems and strategies illustrated with examples from a variety of languages. Prerequisite: *6 in a foreign language at the 150-level or above.
Fall Term 2021The study of the relationship of Latin American writing and writers to the environment with a focus on the landscape and current ecological concerns. Prerequisite: SPAN 300 or 306 or consent of Department.
Winter Term 2021Prerequisites: *3 in SPAN at the 300 level excluding 300 and 306, or consent of the Department. Note: This course can also be applied to the MLCS Certificate in Translation Studies.
Winter Term 2021Prerequisite: consent of Department.
Winter Term 2021201607 - 20190630
ecopoesia.com: An Online Resource on Environment & Poetry from Latin America
Summary of Project
This research project aims at creating a trilingual (Spanish, Portuguese, English) online resource mapping the relationships between contemporary Latin American poetry and the environment. This website will be addressed to both general readers of poetry and to students and researchers in the areas of environment and literature.
Though nature has always been present in literature as a theme, the scholarly study of these connections—green literary studies or ecocriticism—only really blossomed in the last twenty years. With the rise of environmentalism and parallel to this scholarly interest, contemporary poets have also consciously begun to address ecological issues in their creative work. In Europe and North America, anthologies of ecopoetry and scholarly works on ecocriticism and ecopoetics attest to the growth of this field.
Latin American writers have also, in word and deed, long engaged with the environment, but their contributions are less known. As early as 1985, the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis successfully called for action against air pollution and lobbied to protect vulnerable species such as tortoises and whales. Aridjis’s activism is exemplary, but arguably his most enduring contribution, as that of many other fellow poets, lies in his words. In an indirect yet powerful way, his eco-centered poetry teaches us about the connection between humans, others forms of life, and the environment. Ecocriticism convincingly argues that the ways we imagine nature shape our relationship to it. Poetry is a privileged medium in this process for its ability to generate compelling images that reach deeper levels of consciousness. As the Canadian critic Jonathan Butler argues, “for real change [in environmental attitudes] to occur, we must look to the language of the poets who understand that human thought, human embodiment, and the natural world, are not separate from each other but intertwined and interconnected” ( This proposal believes that making such poetry widely available is an invaluable tool in generating environmental responsibility.
Our goal is to bring this important poetry, scattered across many venues and often untranslated, to the attention of both academic and general audiences in Canada, Latin America, and beyond. As a research and pedagogical tool, this online resource will feature biographical notes, critical commentaries, bibliographies, and a generous selection of poems, both in the original as well as in translation. We will showcase established figures such as Homero Aridjis, Ernesto Cardenal, and José Emilio Pacheco, and newer voices, including Astrid Cabral and Sérgio Medeiros, highlighting their unique environmental vision. General audiences will be able to read this poetry in various languages, and experts in the academy will have access, for the first time, to a rigorous corpus of environmental poetry from an important region of the world. In my own program of research, this project will serve as spadework towards a scholarly monograph I plan to write.
The resource’s digital platform will make access possible from any location and will allow different ways of mapping texts. Beyond the traditional “author/work” format, the website will create digital maps of poetry focusing on specific topics (for instance, pollution, endangered species, indigenous ecological knowledge). Through links to actual maps, images, and sounds, it will also allow readers to link poetry to place, text to geography.
Supervised by the principal investigator, two graduate students and two undergraduates will participate in all stages of the project: from selecting the authors and works, to translating, writing commentaries, and designing the website. Besides creating awareness of the field of environment and poetry, the project will train students in a number of specific areas: literary scholarship, editorial work, literary translation, digital humanities & web design, and knowledge mobilization.
Latin America is a key region for Canada in many ways. Latin American populations are growing, and Canada has a presence there, particularly in terms of natural resource extraction. This project mobilizes environmental poetry and insights from that region to new audiences within the academy and beyond. It challenges audiences to rethink our obligations to the environment and generates knowledge about populations and cultures that Canada needs to thrive responsibly in an interdependent world.