My research interests encompass Latin American cultural studies, with a particular focus on film and comparative approaches. I have just completed a book entitled Paid to Care, which examines the depiction of paid domestic workers in post-dictatorship Latin American cultural production, including in film, documentary, literary testimony (testimonio) and digital culture. It interrogates the legacy of slavery and colonialism that weighs on the relationships between domestic workers and the families that employ them by drawing on postcolonial theory and studies of cinematic affect. This research was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship and the book will be published by the University of Texas Press in 2023.

My new project, entitled ‘Affective and Immaterial Labour in Latin(x) American Culture’, is funded by an AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship (2022-2024). It traces the connections between representations of wet-nursing, migrant domestic work and sex work in photography, film, literature and digital culture from the late nineteenth century until the present day.

My first book, Children on the Threshold in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (Lexington Books, 2017), explores the depiction of children and adolescents in contemporary Brazilian, Chilean and Colombian film. The project relates the adoption of a children’s rights discourse in these countries since the 1990s to recent attempts to evoke children’s agency and subjectivity on screen. It also examines the relationship between childhood and the social construction of gender, innocence and national identity. Together with Geoffrey Maguire, I co-edited the volume New Visions of Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Research supervision

I welcome enquiries from prospective research students in any area of Latin American studies, particularly those interested in the following topics:

• Latin American film
• Women’s writing and filmmaking
• Paid domestic work and social reproduction
• Gender studies and childhood studies
• Digital and screen cultures