Department of Comparative Literature, Minor in Latin American Studies

(Graduate Resident Summer 2025)

In my project, I explore what “Central America” has meant to intellectuals and artists in the framing of their work and their subjectivities. The main focus of my dissertation is to examine the aesthetic imaginations of the isthmus by writers and intellectuals in Central America and the region’s diaspora in the United States, especially how they express and understand their Central Americanness vis-à-vis broader groups that theoretically encompass them, like Latin America and Latina/o. I investigate what happens to national, regional, and hemispheric configurations when they are thought from a Central American positionality, the uncomfortable in-betweenness of the isthmus. Throughout the chapters of my dissertation, I analyze how writers’ intersectional identities as Indigenous and/or Afro-Latino/a inform and shape their conception of Central America. I argue that, although the national and regional notions of Central America have consistently proved to be unfit, insufficient, and problematic, they continue to play an important role in contemporary literature for community-making and in imagining the future of the isthmus. In studying contemporary Central American cultural production made by artists in the isthmus as well as those in the diaspora, my research takes a hemispheric approach, effectively putting Latina/o Studies and Latin American Studies in conversation.