I am interested in the intersection of cultural, social, and political processes in Latin America. I study the role of economic crises in understanding contemporary Latin American fiction and its connections to World Literature. I focus on how translation, circulation, and the international understanding of "Latin American writing" has impacted the development of Ecuadorian literature after Ecuador's 1999 economic crisis, also known as the Feriado Bancario. My work aims at shedding light on the work of poorly translated literary voices in the Anglophone academia while informing global debates about the meanings of World Literature from a 'minor' Latin American perspective.
My PhD research focuses on Ecuadorian fiction published after 1999. I draw from New Economic Criticism to identify a shift from the national to the transnational in twenty-first century Ecuador and propose a definition for "contemporary Ecuadorian literature". By examining a selection of novels published in the last twenty years, I propose that, underrepresented in the global literary market in terms of translation and circulation, as well as understudied in the scholarship, Ecuadorian writing illuminates alternative ways of understanding what constitutes a 'World Novel'.
My latest research project focuses on real-time literary responses to Covid-19 in Latin America. I propose that body of fiction deeply engaged with the fears and anxieties caused by the pandemic worldwide is vigorously developing on social media outlets and other digital platforms. I am analysing testimonial writing, survival poetry and Covid-19 flash fiction on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, where machine translation has allowed stories to circulate rapidly across cultural and linguistic territories.