Biography
I am an Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture whose research interests include issues of race and ethnicity within the concepts of nationality and national identity. My research focuses on 19th-century Cuba primarily. At Purdue, the undergraduate courses that I teach most often are our Introduction to Reading Hispanic Literature, Latin American Civilization and Culture, and Latin American Culture, which is a course I designed on the Cuban Revolution. My involvement with the Center on Intercultural Learning, Mentorship, Assessment and Research (CILMAR), as both a participant in their Growing Intercultural Leaders mentorship program, and an attendee of workshops on Intercultural Learning, has given me the opportunity to learn the most effective strategies to explicitly teach for intercultural competence. I am currently working to create an effective anti-racist pedagogy for teaching undergraduate literature in the second-language classroom using a framework based upon Critical Pedagogy and equitable and inclusive teaching practices.