Charlie Geyer (Ph.D. Vanderbilt University, 2019) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He specializes in the comparative study of Latin American and Latinx literatures and cultures, with a focus on the intersections of politics and aesthetics in a hemispheric context, including a transnational approach to the study of diasporic Latinx communities in the US.
Dr. Geyer’s research is interdisciplinary in nature, and centers on the relationship between social marginalization—based on race, gender, sexuality, and immigration status—aesthetics, and political resistance in Latin American and Latinx literature of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In his current book manuscript, tentatively titled Disturbing Beauty: Border Crossing in Latin American and Latinx Imaginaries, he uses methodology from geography, sociology, psychoanalysis, and gender/queer theory to study the manner in which dominant groups in Latin America (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil) and the Latinx United States (the US-Mexico Borderlands and the Puerto Rican diaspora) seek to secure their borders, physically and metaphorically, against incursion by marginalized groups. The practice of exclusion through border construction is manifested in aesthetic terms through the representation of marginal subjects as grotesque, revolting, or threatening. Conversely, Dr. Geyer’s research examines works that offer a contestatory discourse through finding beauty in bodies and spaces that have been rendered abject in the dominant cultural imaginary, and engage in the political work of disturbing oppressive aesthetic and sociopolitical bordering practices. His work may be found in Chasqui, The Comparatist, and CENTRO: Journal for the Center of Puerto Rican Studies, and is also currently under review in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos.
Dr. Geyer’s teaching experience includes courses in both Spanish and Portuguese language, as well as various courses related to his research expertise, including “Beauty and Marginality in Contemporary Latin America,” “Borderless Borderlands: Latin American Migrations through Literature and Film,” “Queer Crossings: Latin and Latinx Americas,” and “Introduction to Latinx Studies.”