Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra

Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
445 Burrowes Bldg.
Armillas-Tiseyra headshot 2024

Office Hours: Spring 2024

On Leave AY 2023-2024

Curriculum Vitae

Education

PhD, New York University, 2012
MA, New York University, 2007
BA, George Washington University, 2005

Professional Bio

My research centers on post-independence Latin American and African literatures and forms part of the growing field of South-South comparison. I am especially interested in the intersection of local or regional specificities with large-scale comparative frameworks such as World Literature and, in particular, the Global South. My first book, The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South (Northwestern UP, 2019), is a comparative study of novels about dictators in the post-independence literatures of Latin America and Africa, which offers a framework for further work on writing about dictatorship in the literatures of the Global South. My current book-length project analyzes the ways in which the legacies of the Latin American literary "boom" of the 1960s and 70s have inflected the international circulation and reception of literature from other regions of the Global South.

In the past decade, I have worked extensively to help grow and expand the field of Global South studies in the US. Projects include co-directing the digital platform Global South Studies; guest editing, with Anne Garland Mahler, two special issues of CLS: Comparative Literature Studies on "New Critical Directions in Global South Studies" (58.3; 2021 and 59.1; 2022);  organizing the conference “Thinking the Global South: A Critical Vocabulary for the Twenty-First Century,” which took place at Penn State in 2018; guest editing an issue for the journal The Global South ("Dislocations," 7.2; 2013); and serving as a founding member of the executive committee for the forum on the Global South (CLCS; G152) at the Modern Language Association (MLA) (2015-2020).

In addition to my post at Penn State, I am a current recipient of a Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (Germany) and will be in residence at the Universität zu Köln in the 2023-2024 academic year as well as during portions of 2025 and 2026. In the 2021-2022 academic year, I was a visiting scholar in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago and a guest researcher at the the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin, Germany (summer). Prior to joining Penn State in 2015, I was an Early Career Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center (2014-2015) and Assistant Professor of World Literature in the English Department at the University of Mississippi, where I taught courses on World Literature and postcolonial studies (2012-2015). I received my PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University in 2012.