Michelle Clayton

Associate Professor

clayton@humanities.ucla.edu

(310) 267-5851

Humanities 358

Michelle Clayton holds a joint appointment in the departments of Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese. She grew up in Dublin, Ireland, received her BA in Modern Languages (Spanish & German) from Oxford University,  and earned a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures from Princeton University (2003). Her research and teaching focus on the intersection between Latin American and comparative studies, with a particular grounding in the international avant-gardes, and on relays between different art-forms (poetry, film, dance, painting) and the media of modernity in the Americas and Western Europe.
Her first book, The Reach of Poetry: César Vallejo and Interwar Aesthetic Politics, which examines the Peruvian writer’s poetry and prose in the light of the broader Latin American and European avant-gardes and contemporary theory, is forthcoming from the University of California Press. She is currently working on a second book, Moving Bodies of the Avant-Garde, which examines various forms of cultural circulation in the early decades of the twentieth century, aiming in particular to foreground the role of dance in the avant-gardes. By illustrating the diverse ways in which avant-garde culture moved, and by comparing divergent responses to circulating icons in Europe and the Americas, the project hopes to offer a more interdisciplinary and transnational approach to questions of cultural exchange. In 2008-09 she is a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge, MA.

Selected Publications

“Mariátegui y la escena contemporánea”, in Mabel Moraña & Guido Podestá, eds. José Carlos Mariátegui y los estudios latinoamericanos. Pittsburgh: IILI, Serie Críticas, forthcoming.

“Paciencia y barajar”, in Daniel Balderston, ed. Las novelas cortas de Onetti. UNESCO/Colección Archivos, forthcoming.

“Trilce’s Lyric Matters”, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, XLII:1,  January 2008, pp. 83-107.

“End of Story: Mario Vargas Llosa’s La guerra del fin del mundo”, in Efraín Kristal, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), pp. 283-294.

“Cómo habla la plata”, in Adriana Rodríguez Pérsico & Jorge Fornet, eds. Ricardo Piglia: una poética sin límites (Pittsburgh: U. of Pittsburgh, Serie Antonio Cornejo Polar, 2004), pp. 135-144.