Emily is a Lecturer in Latin American Cultural Studies at Birkbeck. She received her PhD and MPhil from the University of Cambridge and BA from the University of Warwick.
Emily is currently completing a monograph about Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust in contemporary Latin American Literature, including authors from Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Colombia. Many of the writers were concerned with de-centering Nazism from a so-called totalitarian moment in European history, and re-contextualised the ideology and practices in a longer history of violence and eugenics that extends back to the nineteenth century origins of modern republics such as Mexico and Argentina. Authors also linked the structures underpinning Nazi ideology to contemporary fascisms inherent in modern territorial forms of governance. Their fiction registers or anticipates the rise of nationalisms and entrenching of borders that have come to characterise the international politics of recent times. Emily’s new project, entitled ‘New Hybridities in Latin American Culture from the Boom to the Present’, uses the concept of ‘hybridity’ to examine power assymetries at work across fault lines of race, gender and sexuality in the region, as well as cultural production which rejects divisions between Nature and Society in the age of the Anthropocene. A parallel project examines representations of the Cold War in contemporary Latin American literature, as a follow-up to the Nazism book.