Johnathan Vaknin is Assistant Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Arizona, he earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley and his B.A. in Hispanic Studies at UPenn. His research and teaching focus on the cultural production of the Caribbean basin, with an emphasis on the relationship between literature and medicine. Other areas of specialization include queer and sexuality studies; theories of temporality; phenomenology and embodiment; Jewish Latin American culture; comparative modernisms (Latin American, French, and British); and the neobaroque. He is currently at work on his first monograph, provisionally entitled Sick Days: Illness, Temporality, and Latin American Culture. Stretching from the late-19th century to the present, and bringing together writers and visual artists from the Caribbean and the Southern Cone, the book examines how aesthetic objects--novels, poems, sculptures, and literary non-fiction--register the temporal alterations produced by the experience of illness.