Isabella C. Vergara

My research and teaching specializes in contemporary Latin(x) American literature, visual arts, experimental poetry, and feminist and queer studies. I explore how gender, memory, and materiality intersect across hemispheric contexts, with special attention to literary, visual, and sonic practices. My first book project, Poetic Traces: Latin(x) American Objects, Archives, Dust, theorizes an undisciplined approach to memory and form. The book challenges dominant frameworks in memory studies by foregrounding a poetics of fragility, ephemerality, and precariousness. Drawing on experimental poetry, performance, photography, and sound, it argues that minor, unstable, and residual materials—understood as intermaterial forms—can reconfigure how we sense time and history beyond archival completeness or monumental narratives.