Here’s what you need to know about me: I love a good yarn; I love a good debate; I love connection. My first love brought me to comparative literary studies, and I earned a master’s in English literature and a PhD in comparative literature, specializing in the literature of the Americas (15th to 19th century). Those pursuits led me to teaching, which allowed me not only to hone my teaching and mentoring skills but also to debate for a living through the Socratic method.

My experiences in teaching, mentoring, and academic advising helped me affirm that I hunger for connection–and that, perhaps more than ever, human connection is mediated by and through technology. And so I find myself engaged in a new agenda animated by this question: how do our engagements with stories–and with each other through stories–help us explore our responsibility to each other as what the early Marx called fellow species beings?

I am interested in pursuing these questions rigorously, theoretically. But, even though I am completing a formal academic program, Georgetown University’s Master’s in Communication, Culture, and Technology, I want to engage in a continuing, iterative conversation with others who participate in civil discourse about stories regardless of where they are located: in the world out there or in the academy, the Global South or the Global North, en aquellos lenguajes que viven en el margen or those that are exalted by accidents of history. As an immigrant to this country, I have learned to be a translator and a conduit between people and communities. My life experiences, I believe, have given me the skills to engage in dialogue with different communities (i.e., academic and non-academic as well as across cultures and social identities) and also to mediate between different communities. My goal is to be in professional, academic, and cultural roles where I get to learn how we know what we know through stories, learn how to better debate for the purposes of mutual understanding and of achieving common goals, and, thus, learn not only what it means to be responsible for each other but also how to live up to that responsibility.