Lena Burgos Lafuente

Lena Burgos Lafuente

Assistant Professor, Latin American Literature, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature, Stony Brook University

Lena Burgos Lafuente (PhD NYU, 2011) is Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature, Stony Brook University. She specializes in poetry, Latin American essay writing, sound studies, and transatlantic literary crossings in the first half of the twentieth century. She has published articles on the Spanish Republican exile in the Caribbean, Caribbean literature, and the essays of Jorge Luis Borges, and edited special issues on poet Julia de Burgos (CENTRO Journal, 2014) and philosopher María Zambrano (Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2015).

Burgos-Lafuente is working on two book manuscripts. In Poéticas del destiempo: literatura y política en el Caribe de mediados de siglo XX, (forthcoming 2017), she discusses the critical juncture at which prevailing ideological positions induced by the Second World War in the Caribbean met a new political poetics of postwar literature in the encounter between Caribbean writers and Spanish exiles in the late 1940s and 1950s. In Pedagogies of Progress: Listening to the Long 1950s in Puerto Rico, she examines the dissonances between sonic and visual cultures in the artistic production of 1940s-1960s Puerto Rico. Burgos-Lafuente was the recipient of a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2014-2015.

Working Group Affiliation

Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy