ABOUT MAIA GIL’ADÍ

I am an Assistant Professor of English at Boston University, where I specialize in Latinx and multiethnic literature. I am also affiliated faculty in the Center for Latin American Studies, the American & New England Studies Program, and African American & Black Diaspora Studies program. My first book, Doom Patterns: Latinx Speculations and the Aesthetics of Violence is forthcoming with Duke University Press. In it, I examine how portrayals of destruction paradoxically foreground pleasure in humor, narrative beauty, and the grotesque. I argue that through literary devices I call “doom patterns” (devices such as thematic repetition, non-linear narration, character fragmentation, and unresolved plots), readers are consistently returned to instances of destruction and historical violence.

In service to the profession, I am the 2nd Vice President of the Motherboard of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP), was a member of the founding executive committee for Latina and Latino Literature forum of the Modern Language Association, have served as co-chair of the Latinx section of the Latin American Studies Association, and serve on the editorial board of Label Me Latina/o. I am also the recipient of a six-month Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars.