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 and, in particular, the Global South. I have published essays on such wide-ranging topics as the contemporary novel and the Global South, Africa and science fiction, magical realism in the South Atlantic, and the function of the fetish in representations of the African dictator, 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.

Recent and on-going projects include writing on Gabriel García Márquez and the Global South, J.M. Coetzee and Latin America, comparative approaches to novels of political disillusionment, as well as on questions of genre and the role of genre fiction (particularly crime and science fiction) in work by writers from the African continent and the recent diaspora. 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.

In the past decade, I have also worked extensively to help grow and expand the field of Global South studies. Projects include co-directing the digital platform Global South Studies; guest editing, with Anne Garland Mahler, two special issues of CLS: Comparative Literature Studies on "New Critical Directions in Global South Studies" (58.3; 2021 and 59.1; 2022);  organizing the conference “Thinking the Global South: A Critical Vocabulary for the Twenty-First Century”; guest editing an issue for the journal The Global South ("Dislocations," 7.2; 2013); and serving 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).

I am currently serving a five-year term on the executive committee on the for the forum on Prose Fiction (GS; D012) at the MLA. I also edit the book reviews for CLS: Comparative Literature Studies and am a member of the editorial collective of MFS: Modern Fiction Studies. Beginning in fall 2024, I also form part of the organizing team for the podcast Novel Dialogue, for which I have interviewed writers such as the Argentine Mariana Enríquez and the South African Masande Ntshanga. 

In addition to my current academic post, I currently hold a Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. I was in residence at the Romance Languages Seminar in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Köln, Germany, in the 2023-2024 academic year, and will return in summer 2025 and summer 202. 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, where I taught courses on World Literature and postcolonial studies (2012-2015). I received my PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University in 2012.