Teaching
Teaching Philosophy
Alexandra’s teaching focuses on developing her students’ sense of voice, both written and spoken. Her courses are centered around encounters with literature, art, and photography to equip students at all levels to develop their four competencies through active engagement with Latin American cultures. Her approach to language acquisition, which she has taught from true beginner to advanced levels, uses the communicative approach to foreground conversation. When teaching literature and theory, she uses a seminar-style format to build student confidence in scholarly discussion and blends creative assignments, like student-made podcasts and short stories, with structured academic writing.
Technologies of Belonging
Technology and Latin American Literature
How does technology shape our sense of belonging? This class explores how technologies in contemporary Latin American short stories, films, and novels weave invisible threads that bind people to one another. Examining words in diverse national contexts and moments in time, students will trace the connections that continue to define our lives today.
Lovesick
The Latin American Gothic
This course follows the love stories of 20th– and 21st-century Latin American gothic fictions from touchstone authors like Gabriel García Márquez to contemporary standouts like Samanta Schweblin. Working from a historically grounded perspective across several literary movements, we begin with tales of hopeful lovers in the early 20th century, follow the disenchanted magic of the midcentury Boom, and end with the poisoned familial love stories of the present. Students will gain exposure to diverse theoretical lenses including gender studies, materialism, and ecocriticism as we traverse colonial pasts that refuse to die, bodies both haunted and haunting, and environmental disasters that overtake the future. This course is conducted in Spanish.
The Future’s Not for Sale
Utopian Imagination in Latin America
In 1959, the Cuban Revolution awakened a desire for socialist change in Latin America that captured the attention of the United States and Soviet Union, transforming the region into an ideological battleground. But Latin American science fiction writers responded loud and clear: the future’s not for sale. They wrote a future in which their nations were holding the pen, redrawing the dynamics of power to imagine an equitable tomorrow. This course asks what we can learn from their work today. Beginning with readings by scholars like Suvin and Jameson, we explore midcentury science fiction in diverse forms, including novels, comics like El Eternauta, and Chile’s socialist cybernetics project, Cybersyn. The material challenges students to think beyond a U.S.-centric subject position, engaging texts that reimagine the future from the periphery. This course is conducted in Spanish