Featured Student Stories

Language has always been important to Alex Aguayo. Growing up in a bilingual household, he learned the significance of knowing more than one language, not only to his Mexican-American family, but politically and socially as well. He has since added French and Portuguese to his repertoire and actively uses both languages in his research.

When Alex was an undergraduate student, he found himself unsatisfied with his initial engineering trajectory and began searching for a major that would better suit his interests. Upon reflecting on what he really enjoyed, he realized that he loved reading above all else. He had always considered reading as a hobby, but quickly made reading and analyzing literature his primary academic interest. Comparative Literature allows Alex to combine his passions for reading and learning languages.

Comparative Literature - the study of literature across languages, cultures, and historical contexts - offers a broader perspective than the traditional British and American Literature focus of an English Department. It is a transnational discipline that asks: what is literature and how has our view of it changed over time?

For his dissertation, Alex is examining the lyric poetry of four contemporary women poets of African descent living in the Americas: Claudia Rankine and Dawn Lundy Martin in the United States, Miriam Alves in Brazil, and Nancy Morejón in Cuba. Lyric poetry, which characteristically uses first person pronouns and expresses personal emotions, provides intimate insight into personal experiences and consciousness. Alex argues that the work of these poets not only represents their identity as black women within their cultures but also a history of gender, race, and sexuality. Claudia Rankine writes in Citizen: An American Lyric, “Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition.”

As an advanced graduate student, Alex is no longer teaching or taking classes which leaves him time to focus on his own research. He typically spends his days in the Bentley Historical Library on North Campus either sifting through books of poetry and fiction (written in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and sometimes French) or writing. At first, Alex found it overwhelming deciding what to read given the wealth of information at his fingertips and found himself venturing down various rabbit holes. Over time, he has learned to hone his reading selections by determining what is the most relevant to his four poets of focus.

Alex finds joy in unraveling the mystery behind a line of poetry. He sometimes comes across a line that seems out of place. He pauses and puzzles over the meaning. Often the poet placed the line there to allude to the body of work of another author which may even have another allusion embedded within it (hence the rabbit holes). He traces the strand from poet to authors to critics and back again to piece together this literary conversation. Alex describes this as “eye opening experience,” realizing that so much can be communicated in just one line. This reinforces his and the field’s drive for comparative literature research. Language can be loaded with more than the word itself when you consider the associations that comes from those words and what those associations mean in a broader cultural sense.