I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University (University Park), where I teach broadly comparative courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. My research centers on post-independence Latin American and African literatures and forms part of the growing field of South-South comparison. I am especially interested in the intersection of local or regional specificities with large-scale comparative frameworks such as world literature, postcolonial studies, and the Global South.

I have published on such wide-ranging topics as the contemporary novel and the Global South, magical realism in the South Atlantic, Gabriel García Márquez and the Global South, J.M. Coetzee and Latin America, the intersection of Latin American studies and world literature, and questions of genre and the role of genre fiction (e.g. crime fiction, speculative fiction) in contemporary African and Latin American cultural production, as well as a translation of the prologue to Antonio de Nebrija’s Grammar of the Castilian Language (1492). My first book, The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South (Northwestern UP, 2019), is a comparative study of novels about dictators in the post-independence literatures of Latin America and Africa. My current book-length project analyzes the ways in which the legacies of the Latin American literary "boom" of the 1960s and ‘70s have inflected the international circulation and reception of literature from other regions of the Global South, from the rise of the postcolonial novel through the current explosion of interest in the work of writers from the African continent as well as a new generation of Latin American women writers.

I have also worked extensively to help grow and expand the field of Global South studies. This includes my work as co-director of the digital platform Global South Studies, which launched in 2017 and underwent a significant expansion and redesign in 2025. I have also co-guest edited two special issues of CLS: Comparative Literature Studies on "New Critical Directions in Global South Studies" (58.3; 2021 and 59.1; 2022); organized the conference “Thinking the Global South: A Critical Vocabulary for the Twenty-First Century” (Penn State, March 2018); guest edited an issue for the journal The Global South ("Dislocations," 7.2; 2013); and served as a founding member of the executive committee for the forum on the Global South (CLCS; G152) at the Modern Language Association (MLA) (2015-2020). In more recent years, I have also served on the executive committee for the forum on Prose Fiction (GS; D012) at the MLA from 2023-2025. I am a member of the editorial collectives of the journals CLS: Comparative Literature Studies and MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, as well as part of the organizing team for the podcast Novel Dialogue.

In addition to my academic post, I currently hold a Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (2023-2026). In the 2021-2022 academic year, I was a visiting scholar in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago and a guest researcher at the the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin, Germany (summer). Prior to joining Penn State in 2015, I was an Early Career Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center (2014-2015) and Assistant Professor of World Literature in the English Department at the University of Mississippi (2012-2015). I received my PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University in 2012.