In this book presentation, Ignacio Infante, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish, will discuss his latest scholarly monograph, A Planetary Avant-Garde. This book explores how experimental poetics and literature networks have aesthetically and politically responded to the legacy of Iberian colonialism across the world, with a focus on avant-garde responses to Spanish and Portuguese imperialism across Europe, Latin America, West Africa, and Southeast Asia between 1909 and 1929. Infante will be joined in conversation by Sarah María Medina, Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature. 

Ignacio Infante is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish, and Co-Director of the Center for the Literary Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics across the Atlantic (Fordham University Press, 2013), and more recently, A Planetary Avant-Garde: Experimental Literature Networks and the Legacy of Iberian Colonialism (University of Toronto Press, 2023). His research in the fields of comparative literature, translation studies, modern and avant-garde poetics, and Hispanic studies has been published in numerous edited volumes and scholarly journals. A literary translator, he has translated the work of US poet John Ashbery, A Wave / Una Ola (Lumen/Penguin Random House, 2003); the British novelist Will Self, How the Dead Live / Cómo viven los muertos (Random House Mondadori, 2003); and co-translated with Michael Leong Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven by Chilean avant-garde poet Vicente Huidobro (co•im•press, 2020). 

Free and open to all, registration requested.

Co-sponsored by University Libraries, the Program in Comparative Literature, and the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures.