I was born in 1985 in Argentina, but grew up between Buenos Aires and São Paulo (Brazil), within a plurilingual family and a diverse heritage —a mix of Italian, Portuguese, Sub-Saharan African and Indigenous background from what is now Brazil. After a major economical and political crisis that affected South America in the early 2000s, I moved with my family to Catalonia, Spain, where I earned two BAs at the Universitat de Barcelona (Comparative Literature and Spanish Language and Literature). In 2010, I moved to Paris (France), as part of the Erasmus Program, to study at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV. In 2013, I completed my MA in Littérature et Histoire at the Université Paris 7, where I wrote the thesis Le fantastique hispanique à la lumière de la théorie et la sociologie de la littérature, under the supervision of Prof Guiomar Hautcœur. In 2019, I obtained my PhD in Hispanic Studies at the University of British Columbia (Canada), where I wrote the dissertation A Poetics of Failure: Individualism and the Post Dictatorial State in Southern Cone Detective Stories, under the supervision of Prof. Jon Beasley-Murray. In January 2021, I joined the ANU, where I have been convening the Portuguese and the Spanish programmes, conducting research and teaching courses on different levels of Spanish language as well as Spanish and Latin American literature and film.

My first book, Latin American Detectives against Power: Individualism, the State and Failure in Crime Fiction (Lexington, 2022), was awarded the International Crime Fiction Association 2022 Book Prize. Whereas detective stories have often been read as a modern translation of an old literary opposition —good and evil, order against chaos, the cop chasing the thief—, the book examines an underlying battle at stake: the rivalry between the detective and the police. In turn, this antagonism stands for the deeper historical and political tensions between individidualism and the state —personified by the detective and the police, respectively. Traditionally, this has been regarded as a critique of the state: in Poe, Conan Doyle or Chandler, either the armchair detective or the hard-boiled tough guy, they almost invariably outwit the incompetent police at the end of the plot, solving the case first. Latin American Detectives against Power explores Argentine, Brazilian and Chilean 1990s detective stories dealing with 1970s state-sponsored dictatorial violence. Examining the centrality of failure —understood as defeat and malfunction— in these narratives, the book exposes how the Anglo-American canon, with its masculine fantasies of individualism and power, functions more as an apology than as a genuine critique of the state.

Reviews:

• Clues
• Journal of Latin American Geography
• Periphērica
• Crime Fiction Studies
• Bulletin of Spanish Studies

***

My second book, Precarious Secrets: A History of the Political Thriller in Latin America, will be published by University of Texas Press on December 16, 2025. For the past five decades, a distinctive type of political thriller has been steadily developing in Latin America. The book is a panoramic overview of the genre in the hands of renowned writers and filmmakers from Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil, as well as lesser-known Uruguayan, Peruvian and Paraguayan artists for whom the style has been a vehicle for pungent narratives shot through with menace and conspiracy. Precarious Secrets explores the genre's unique role in Latin American entertainment and activism, tracing its evolution from its emergence in the 1970s, through the silence imposed by dictatorships and the genre's resurgence after the Cold War. The political thriller has dramatized the region's turbulent past, through assassinations, coups, mass killings, revolutions and the search of desaparecidos by human rights organizations. In the process, the book isolates the Latin American political thriller's particular grammar of secrecy. In the Hollywood thriller, revealing secrets involves high stakes and transformative consequences. In Latin American political thrillers, by contrast, secrets produce only more precarity —moral ambiguity as unsettling as it is unshakeable.

Precarious Secrets: The Political Thriller in the River Plate (2024), a short documentary filmed by Dr. Iván Cherjovsky across Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Canberra, serves as a companion piece of the book. Starting in November 2025, it will be available to watch on SBS on Demand. The film delves into the roots and aftershocks of the political thriller genre in Argentina and Uruguay, revealing how it continues to shape the River Plate region’s collective memory. Blending detective-like inquiry with in-depth conversations, the film features acclaimed voices, such as Benjamín Ávila (Clandestine Childhood, 2011), Benjamín Naishtat (Rojo, 2018) and Daniela Goggi (The Rescue, Paramount+ 2023), among others. Precarious Secrets connects past and present to reveal why these thrillers still matter —and what they say about truth, power, and storytelling in South America.

***

My first novel, Parece diciembre (Equidistancias, 2025) [It Looks Like December], is a coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of political turmoil, weaving together themes of migration, diaspora, uprooting, the search for identity, and the transformative power of music and literature.

PhD Hispanic Studies (University of British Columbia); MA Littérature et Histoire (Université Paris 7); BA Comp. Lit. and BA Spanish (Universitat de Barcelona).

• Intersections between Fiction, History and Political Theory
• 20^th and 21^st centuries Latin American Literature and Film
• Trans-Indigenous Literature and Film across the Pacific: Global South Studies (Latin America and Australia)
• Latin American Studies and Critical Theory: Infrapolitics and Affect Theory
• Popular Genres: Crime Fiction, Political Thriller