Alexis Hernando Cubas

Alexis Hernando Cubas is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on memory studies from a transhistorical and global perspective, incorporating literary and cultural heritage from Hispanophone Africa, Latin America, and the Iberian Peninsula. His work considers diverse theoretical frameworks, including posthumanism, material culture, transatlantic studies, coloniality, race, and intellectual history.

His manuscript, The Chorus of the Deserts: The Hispanophone Beyond the Imperial, examines literature, visual arts, and material culture from the deserts of the Spanish-speaking world. The thesis develops a global understanding of the Spanish Empire's afterlives and the establishment of new colonial agendas, in which local nation-states also act as agents. It explores various stages of 19th- and 20th-century empire-building by European and U.S. powers in desert territories, often in collaboration with authoritarian regimes in Latin America and the Maghreb. 

His case studies consider the politics of empire through the lens of nitrate extraction, industrial infrastructure, and the flow of financial capital. He analyzes how diverse expressions of propaganda in print and visual culture serve as a testament to the changing relationship between desert landscapes and their inhabitants due to the penetration of new technologies and infrastructure for raw material extraction and military control, particularly in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Morocco, and the Western Sahara. His project also explores the heritage of diasporic and nomadic populations, as well as the work of sindicalist and politically persecuted activists and artists who resisted linguistic, political, and extractive pressures. Alexis engages with the palimpsestic nature inscribed in the materiality of archives, the proliferation of fictional and non-fictional accounts of imperial violence, and aesthetic experiments guided by the politics of memory and landscape intervention. He argues that the intimate accounts of memory found in these archives and aesthetic projects are open to a transhistorical understanding and challenge the celebratory myths of imperial capital.

Before joining the department, Alexis earned a B.A. and Licenciatura in Hispanic Literature from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and an M.A. in Romance Languages from Johns Hopkins University. He has worked in the Department of Humanities and the Office of the President at PUCP and as a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Johns Hopkins. Additionally, he was part of the photographic project 'Veins of Influence,' which focused on colonial Ceylon at the Museum of Oxford with the sponsorship of Oxford University. Recently, his work in the Digital Humanities was awarded by the Mellon Foundation, and his research has been sponsored by the Center of Latin American and Latinx Studies and the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly. His publications have been featured in academic journals in both Latin America and the United Kingdom.