Hispanoamerica, Brazil and the Global South: Literature, Culture and Film
Professional Focus
I offer classes in Latin American literatures, film history, and cultural studies, as well as on cultural pharmacology. My research concerns the conceptual history of modernity, heterogeneity in the Americas, new narrative formations of the Global South, and psychoactive modernity.
From 2000 to 2010, I held a full professorship at the University of Pittsburgh.
I have authored books on narcoepics, violence, affectivity and ethics; narratology and cultural studies in Latin America; the conceptual history of popular culture; the melodramatic imagination; hermeneutics of communication; and Alejo Carpentier. My current research explores relationships between embodied communication, rituality, and anthropological pharmacology.
Education
I received a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from the University of Rostock, and a Dr. Habil. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the J. W. Goethe-University Frankfurt Main.
Books
The Pharmakon
Concept Figure, Image of Transgression, Poetic Practice
Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018
Narcodependencia
Escenarios heterogéneos de narración y reflexión
México: El colegio Nacional, 2018
Narcoepics:
A Global Aesthetics of Sobriety
London / New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Violence Without Guilt:
Ethical Narratives from the Global South
New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008
Renarración y descentramiento
Mapas alternativos de la imaginación en América Latina
Madrid–Frankfurt Main: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2004
Narraciones anacrónicas de la modernidad
Melodrama e intermedialidad en América Latina
Editor and co-autor
Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2002
Fronteras de la modernidad en América latina
Editor with Mabel Moraña.
University of Pittsburgh/Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2003
Modernidad heterogénea
Descentramientos hermenéuticos desde la comunicación en América Latina
Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela/Centro de Investigaciones Postdoctorales, 2000
Contemporaneidad latinoamericana y análisis cultural
Conversaciones al encuentro de Walter Benjamin
with Jesús Martín-Barbero.
Madrid–Frankfurt Main: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2000
Heterotopien der Identität
Literatur in interamerikanischen Kontaktzonen
Heterotopias of Identity. Literature in the Interamerican Contact Zones
Editor with Utz Riese, [Homi K. Bhabha and Mark Poster are among the authors of the volume]
Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1999
Sprünge im Spiegel
Postkoloniale Aporien der Moderne in beiden Amerika
Fissures in the Mirror. Postcolonial Aporias of Modernity in the Americas
Editor with Utz Riese.
Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1997
Posmodernidad en la periferia
Enfoques latinoamericanos de la nueva teoría cultural
Editor with Monika Walter
Berlin: Langer Verlag, 1994
Intermedialität als Erzählerfahrung
Isabel Allende, José Donoso und Antonio Skármeta im Dialog mit Film, Fernsehen, Theater
Intermediality as Narrative Experience
Frankfurt Main: Peter Lang, 1994
Romankunst in Lateinamerika
The Modern Novel in Latin America
Editor
Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1989
Alejo Carpentier:
Persönliche Geschichte eines literarischen Moderneprojekts
Alejo Carpentier: Personal History of a Literary Modernity Project
Munich: Verlag Text & Kritik, 1991
