Michelle Clayton

Assistant 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, although her interests range more broadly over poetry, narrative, and film from the 19th century to the present in Latin America, Spain, Ireland, Britain, France, and Germany. She recently completed her first book project, Provincial of the World: César Vallejo and the Reach of Poetry, which examines the Peruvian writer’s poetry and prose in the light of the broader Latin American and European avant-gardes and contemporary theory. In 2008-09 she will be a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, working on a project which studies the place of dance in the avant-gardes as medium and metaphor for the transnational circulation of culture, focusing on the example of six figures or groups in constant movement through the period: Charlie Chaplin, Tórtola Valencia, Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker, the Ballets Russes, and the Ballets Suédois. A further work-in-progress examines the intersections between poetry and the media of modernity, tracking lyric connections, translations, and imagined or real movements between the Americas and Europe.

Selected Publications
“Mariátegui y la escena contemporánea”, Revista Iberoamericana, forthcoming.
“Paciencia y barajar”, in Daniel Balderston, ed. Las novelas cortas de Onetti (UNESCO/Colección Archivos, forthcoming).
 “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: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 283-294.
“Cómo habla la plata”, in Adriana Rodríguez Pérsico & Jorge Fornet, eds. Ricardo Piglia: una poética sin límites (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh, Serie Antonio Cornejo Polar, 2004), pp. 135-144.