Associate Professor

American Literary Studies

Research Area/s

20th & 21st-Century US Literature, Film Studies, Visual Culture, Critical Studies of Race and Class

Contact Information

Email: jcostantino@unm.edu
Office Location: Humanities 339

Biography

Jesús Costantino received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011. His approach to twentieth and twenty-first century US literature and visual culture combines theories of political violence, aesthetic philosophy, and the critical study of race and class. He is currently completing his first book, Scraps in Black and White: Boxing, Race, and Media in the Segregation Era, in which he connects the seemingly disparate histories of modernist abstraction, new media technologies, and US segregation by accounting for their shared preoccupation with interracial prize-fighting.

Compelled by the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, immigrant detention, and other forms of state-sponsored disappearance throughout the Americas, he has also begun work on a new project titled Under the Sign of Disaster Triumphant that analyzes the shared colonial legacy of dispossession--an abstract process frequently made visible and tangible in depictions of architectural ruin. Supplementing these two book-length projects, he continues to explore the interplay between visual media and the literary arts in essays on Gordon Parks's fashion photography, independent video game design, and the photo-texts of the Depression Era.

Recent publications include:

• "Cities of Air: Data Visualization and Architectural Memory in the Art and Literature of Forced Disappearance," ASAP/Journal 6.1 (January 2021);
• "The Multiple Lives of Permadeath," Introduction to Special Issue, "Permadeath and Precarity," with Alenda Cheng and Braxton Soderman. Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 9.2 (Summer 2017);
• "The Squared City: Prizefighting, Tenement Reform, and Spatial Physiognomy at the Turn of the Century," American Literary Realism 49.3 (2017);
• “Harlem in Furs: Race and Fashion in the Photography of Gordon Parks,” Modernism/modernity 23.4 (2016);
• “The Boxer’s Pain, the Bull’s Prose: Race, American Boxing, and Hemingway’s Ring Aesthetics,” The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1915-1945. Vol. 15 (2015);
• “Seeing without Feeling: Muybridge’s Boxing Pictures and the Rise of the Bourgeois Spectator.” Film & History 44.2 (Fall 2014): 66-81.