Associate Professor

American Literary Studies

Research Area/s

20th & 21st Century Literature & Visual Culture; Media Studies; Hemispheric American Studies

Contact Information

Email: jcostantino@unm.edu
Office Location: PAIS 1223

Biography

Jesús Costantino researches and teaches twentieth and twenty-first century US literature and visual culture. His first book, Scraps in Black and White, connects the seemingly disparate histories of modernist abstraction, new media technologies, and US segregation by accounting for their shared preoccupation with interracial prizefighting. He has also begun work on a new project titled Under the Sign of Disaster Triumphant that analyzes the shared legacies throughout the Americas of dispossession and disappearance, abstract processes made visible in depictions of architectural ruin. Supplementing these two projects, he continues to explore the interplay between visual media and the literary arts in essays on subjects ranging from fashion photography, independent video game design, superhero comics, and contemporary Latin American cinema.

Selected Publications:

Scraps in Black and White: Race, Boxing, and Media in the Segregation Era (Rutgers University Press) [forthcoming]

"Cities of Air: Data Visualization and Architectural Memory in the Art and Literature of Forced Disappearance," ASAP/Journal 6, no.1 (January 2021).

"The Multiple Lives of Permadeath," Introduction to Special Issue, "Permadeath and Precarity," with Alenda Chang and Braxton Soderman, Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 9, no. 2 (Summer 2017).

"The Squared City: Prizefighting, Tenement Reform, and Spatial Physiognomy at the Turn of the Century," American Literary Realism 49, no. 3 (2017).

"Harlem in Furs: Race and Fashion in the Photography of Gordon Parks," Modernism/modernity 23, no. 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, no. 2 (Fall 2014)