Alejandro Puga

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Alejandro Puga’s research focuses on literary representations of Mexico City, with special attention to the Mexican urban novel, a form which emerged in the mid-Twentieth Century, and which has since become a challenged and challenging genre in the ever-complicated task of narrating the megalopolis. His 2012 monograph, La ciudad novelada a fines del siglo XX: Estructura, retórica, y figuración, posits trends and intertextual relationships that are observable in multiple authors who write in and about Mexico City. In subsequent research and publications, Puga has turned his attention to the oralization of urban prose narrative and the positioning of the flâneur as both a literary figure and a potential social actor in the city. Puga’s integration into the Mapping the Megalopolis group has led him to explore how urban theory merges with literary theory to account for the problematic of monumental and contested space in CDMX.  He was a co-leader for the Mapping the Megalopolis grant project and co-editor of the collection of essays resulting from the grant, Mapping the Megalopolis.   When he is not thinking about Mexico City, Alejandro is an Associate Professor of Modern Languages and serves as Chair of Modern Languages at DePauw University.  He is also the Laurel H. Turk Professor of Modern Languages at DePauw.