I am a comparatist and interdisciplinary scholar of colonial and nineteenth-century Mexico with degrees in Latin American and Iberian studies (Columbia) and philosophy (Leuven), and an academic background in literature and visual studies (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz). My work cuts across traditional fields and media, as I'm drawn to intellectual problems that challenge clean-cut periodizations, geographies of knowledge, and discipline-bound methodologies. I am particularly interested in the intersections of early modern antiquarianism, political theology, and hermeneutics, and the role of indigenous intellectuals in the production of knowledge about the past.

In this spirit, I have explored the conditions of historical visibility and the political theology of the Aztec gods in early sixteenth-century historiography ("Taming Teotl"); probed into the political iconology of the foundational plan of Mexico-Tenochtitlan printed in Nuremberg in 1524 ("Nueva España Figurada"); studied the emergence of a vernacular sacred antiquarianism and a visual archaeology of monotheism in sixteenth-century New Spanish codices and Italian antiquarian treatises ("Biblias de solas figuras", "Aztec Monotheism"); and examined the rediscovery of Nahua poetics in the nineteenth century in Mexico and the US ("Postreros acentos") and its meta-translation into Western forms of temporality ("Su herencia fue el llanto"). These studies share a general hermeneutical approach, premised on an awareness of the contingency of the junctures and turning points through which dominant forms of discursivity, knowledge, and even historical positivity are established. I understand hermeneutical analysis as a process of reverse-engineering, useful for elucidating how critical common sense, successful categories of interpretation, and "social facts" emerge.

If an hermeneutical attitude makes me attentive foundational moments, anomalies and one-offs (hapax legomena) in the archive, I am equally interested in the afterlives of constructed meanings that persist through historical discontinuity. Thus, I have written about the emergence of Mexican literature in the margins of the colonial archive ("Bibliographic Muse"), the appearance of Baroque anamorphism in the works of twentieth-century Marxist Mexican writer José Revueltas ("Estruendos de la mirada"), and the debates surounging the impossibility of a national epic in nineteenth-century Mexico ("Waiting for the Epic").

My research has been supported by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut, the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, RI, and Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC.