Faculty Profiles

Born in Buenos Aires, Diego Alonso earned his DEA from the University of Paris III in 1989 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1998. His early research examined the intersections of aesthetics, rhetoric, and politics in Latin American essay writing during the processes of modernization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on authors such as Martí, Rodó, Vasconcelos, Lugones, Mariátegui, Ortiz, and Pedreira. On this topic, he published José Enrique Rodó: una retórica para la democracia (Editorial Trilce, 2009). His more recent work engages with contemporary Argentinean and Uruguayan fiction through hermeneutical approaches to the relations between literature, history, and memory. In this field, he published Espejismos reales. Imágenes y política en la literatura rioplatense (Eduvim, 2023), and has also contributed articles to journals such as Variaciones Borges, Iberoamericana, Latin American Literary Review, and Catálogos. He is currently writing a book on the Mexican-Peruvian writer Mario Bellatin, with a focus on the paradoxes of interpretation and the role of mysticism in his fiction. Professor Alonso was also a founding member of LALISA, an association devoted to promoting Latin American, Latino, and Iberian studies in the Pacific Northwest.

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