During my time as an Ertegun Scholar, I built on the intellectual foundations formed during my undergraduate degree in Modern Languages at Magdalen College, Oxford, continuing to investigate questions of identity primarily in Early Modern Spanish writing. I worked on projects involving race and performativity in works by Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca and Cervantes, and love and identity in the poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega. For my MSt dissertation, I bridged Golden Age Spain and my other area of intellectual formation, modern German writing: the thesis examined a little-known West German novel from 1967, Don Quichotte in Köln, that explicitly refashions Cervantes' magnum opus in the service of contemporary political concerns, and the manuscript of this piece is currently under peer review. I also worked on a paper on Elfriede Jelinek and race, and on translations of works by Ulrike Draesner and Yoko Tawada.
The year I was fortunate enough to spend at Ertegun House was life-changing. I would not be following the intellectual trajectory I am now without the stimulation of such a uniquely interdisciplinary environment: both the seminars and the shared office setup really encouraged me to think in new directions, and to view my work holistically and globally in the context of a broader humanistic landscape. I am so grateful to Mica and Ahmet Ertegun and to the wonderful 2016-2017 Ertegun cohort for making this possible, and am always happy to talk to prospective applicants to the programme, especially from first-generation or low-income backgrounds.
Life After Ertegun House
Since leaving Oxford, I have embarked upon a PhD in Comparative Literature at Stanford University: I am currently in the stage of broadening my interests and expertise, but aim to continue my work on identity. I see my future work as interdisciplinary, bridging literary, performance and anthropological studies to investigate identity- and subjectivity-formation strategies in the Dominican Republic and its associated U.S. diaspora. I would like to draw a parallel between two concepts I see as fundamental to these processes of identity formation: love, specifically sexual and romantic love, and dance. I wish to work with theorizations of intimacy, specifically in a post-colonial context, and how intimate micro-spaces can be exploited or threatened on the public stage by oppressive powers. I also wish to consider the performativity inherent to romantic/sexual relationships and partner-based dance (particularly bachata), and how established gender roles can be reimagined, queered, or rejected. The movement of peoples to the United States is also of interest, as I am interested in combining a exploration of how the lost homeland mediates diasporic desire with an investigation into the changes (or lack of such) that take place in Afro-Caribbean music and dance after crossing the ocean.
One of my priorities as a scholar is to bring as much of my work as possible into the public sphere. I published an article with Buzzfeed Reader in August 2017 on a well-known internet poet, regularly write a TinyLetter, and hope to produce more cultural criticism over the rest of my time at Stanford. I was a 2017-8 Latino Museum Studies Fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, D.C., and I hope to continue combining my academic interest in Latino/Caribbean Studies with public outreach and engagement.