Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies

Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies

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Dr María del Pilar Blanco

Dr. María del Pilar Blanco (M.A. and Ph.D. New York University) is currently working on a project that explores the intersections of science and literature in the work of the Spanish American modernistas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Author of articles on landscape and haunting in literature and film of Spanish America and the U.S., her most recent piece (in Victoria Carpenter, ed. (Re)Collecting the Past, Peter Lang, 2009) “Technology and the Making of Memory in the Exilic Writing of José Martí” takes a look at Martí’s chronicles about American inventor Thomas Edison and his phonograph. Her monograph, Ghost-watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape and the Hemispheric Imagination (forthcoming from Fordham University Press), explores the literary and cinematic representations of haunting in the diverse topographies of Latin America and the United States. Stemming out of her work on haunting and space, she is the co-editor, with Dr. Esther Peeren of the University of Amsterdam, of Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (Continuum, 2010). Her main research interests relate to nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and film from the Americas, hemispheric studies, the Latin American "fin de siglo," science and invention, and the geopolitics of genre.