David Dalton

Associate Professor of Spanish David Dalton& Director of Latin American Studies

PhD, University of Kansas, 2015
MA Brigham Young University, 2011
BA Brigham Young University, 2009

Dr. Dalton joined the faculty as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish in August 2016. He became an Assistant Professor in 2017, and he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2021. He is the author of two singled-authored book. His most recent book, Robos Sacer: Necroliberalism and Cyborg Resistance in Mexican and Chicanx Dystopias (Vanderbilt UP, 2023) discusses interrogates the markets of death that appear in neoliberal-era literature and film from both Mexican and Chicanx cultural producers. Technology emerges as a tool of domination that oppressed people can subvert in an attempt to demand equal rights. His first book, Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Postrevolutionary Mexico (U of Florida P, 2018) discusses the role of science and technology in racial construction in postrevolutionary Mexico. His current book project, tentatively titled Digital Activism in the Mexican Nations: Social Capital, Catharsis, and the Ritual of Resistance gauges the success of different digital social movements in Mexico. It argues that the most successful digital social movements resist a cathartic drive for closure in individual cases and, instead, advocate for structural changes.

Dr. Dalton has taught numerous classes at the graduate and undergraduate levels. He has mentored several MA and Honors theses on the following topics: cultural memory in Latin American cinema; healthcare systems in Latin America; race and ethnicity in postrevolutionary Mexican cinema; religion and identity in Latin America; music in Mexican cinema; queer dystopias in Latin America; and other topics.

Publications

Books
2023. Robo Sacer: Necroliberalism and Cyborg Resistance in Mexican and Chicanx Dystopias. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

2018. Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Postrevolutionary Mexico. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.

  • Honorable Mention: LASA Mexico Book in the Humanities

Edited Volumes and Special Editions

2023. Imagining Latinidad: Digital Diasporas and Public Engagement Among Latin American Migrants. Leiden: Brill. Intro and Coedited with David Ramírez Plascencia.

2022. Healthcare in Latin America: History, Society, Culture. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Intro and Coedited with Douglas J. Weatherford.

2021. El cine de luchadores, special issue of Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea.

2018. The Transatlantic Undead: Zombies in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Cultures, special issue of Alambique: Revista Académica de Ciencia Ficción y Fantasía 6(2). Intro. & Co-edited with Sara Potter.

Peer-Reviewed Articles in Scholarly Journals and Scholarly Books

2023. “Exploiting Liminal Legality: Inclusive Citizenship Models in the Online Discourse of United We Dream.” In Imagining Latinidad: Digital Diaspora and Public Engagement Among Latin American Migrants, edited by David Dalton and David Ramírez Plascencia, 59-79. Leiden: Brill.

2022. “Eugenics and Doubly Marginalized Mexican and Chicana Women: Forced Sterilizations in in Renee Tajima-Peña’s No más bebés.” In Healthcare in Latin America: A Reader, edited by David S. Dalton and Douglas J. Weatherford, 130-39. University of Florida Press. Word Count 3,500.

2022. “Reclamando el ciberespacio para los subalternos: resistencia robo sacer en Smoking Mirror Blues de Ernest Hogan.” In Recalibrando los circuitos de la máquina: imaginarios tecnológicos y ciencia ficción en la narrativa hispánica del siglo XXI, edited by Jonatán Martín and Patricio Sullivan, 219-34. Valencia: Albatros.

2022. “On Virgins, Malinches, and ‘Chicas Modernas’: The Star Power of Lorena Velázquez in Lucha Libre Cinema. In The Lost Cinema of Mexico: From Lucha Libre to Cine Familia, and Other Churros, edited by Olivia Cosentino and Brian L. Price, 62-87. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.

2021. “Science Fiction vs. Magical Realism: Oppositional Aesthetics and Contradictory Political Discourses in Sergio Arau’s A Day without a Mexican.” In Peter Lang Companion to Latin American Science Fiction, eds. Silvia Kurlat Ares and Ezequiel De Rosso, 43-53. New York: Peter Lang.

  • Republished in translation as 2021. “Ciencia ficción versus realismo mágico: Estéticas oposicionales y discursos políticos contradictorios en Un día sin mexicanos, de Sergio Arau,” translated by Delfina Erochenko. In La ciencia ficción en América Latina: Crítica. Teoría. Historía, edited by Silvia Kurlat Ares and Ezequiel De Rosso, 45-56. New York: Peter Lang.

2021. “Drones, Sovereignty, and Exception: Biopolitics and Resistance along the U.S.-Mexican Border.” In The Politics of Technology in Latin America (Volume I): Data Protection, Homeland Security and the Labor Market, edited by Avery Plaw, Barbara Carvalho Gurgel, and David Ramírez Plascencia, 80-94. New York: Routledge.

2021. “Borderlands, Race and Gender in Novels by Helena María Viramontes and Rosario Castellanos.” In Teaching Mexicana and Chicana Writers of the Twentieth Century, ed. Elizabeth C. Martínez, 236-43. New York: The Modern Languages Association of America.

2019. “El consumo de la muerte en las televisiones nacionales: El necroliberalismo y la nación cyborg en ‘Ruido gris’ de Pepe Rojo.” Balajú: Revista de cultura y comunicación 11: 3-26.

2019. “Blocking the Synapse: Distancing Drugs in Sabina Berman’s El narco negocia con Dios.” The Latin Americanist 63(4): 383-98.

2019. “Una ruptura en la fundación nacional(ista): Triángulos amorosos disgénicos en Margarita de niebla de Jaime Torres Bodet y El réferi cuenta nueve de Diego Cañedo.” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 35(3): 382-407.

2019. “On (Dang) Quesadillas and Nachos: Mexican Identity and a Mormon Imaginary in the Films of Jared Hess.” Journal of Religion, Film, and Media Studies 5(2): 141-65.

2019. “Una espectralidad cibernética: Problematizando la memoria hauntológica en Historias del séptimo sello de Norma Yamille Cuéllar.” iMex Revista: México Interdisciplinario/Interdisciplinary Mexico 8(16): 84-97.

2019. “1968 Today: Parallels between Tlatelolco and the Current Moment in Mexico.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2019.1570917 

2018. “Mexican Cinema in the Buffyverse: Toward an Ethics of Transnational Adaptation and Appropriation.” In Where is Adaptation?: Mapping Cultures, Texts, and Contexts,eds. Casie Hermansson and Janet Zepernick, 229-44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

2018. “Immunizing the Zetas: Drug Violence and Zombie Biopolitics in Pedro M. Valencia’s Con Z de zombie.” Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea 24(73): 137-50.

2018. “Antropofagia, Calibanism, and the Post-Romero Zombie: Cannibal Resistance in Latin America and the Caribbean.” The Transatlantic Undead: Zombies in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Cultures, special issue of Alambique: Revista Académica de Ciencia Ficción y Fantasía 6(2): 1-20.

2018. “Treating Indigeneity: Medicine and Racial Privilege in ‘La rueda del hambriento’ and ‘El don rechazado’ by Rosario Castellanos.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 52(3): 347-70.

2018. “Borderline Technologies: ‘Bear Life’ and Cyborg Theatre in the Work of Alejandro Ricaño.” Latin American Theatre Review 52(1): 65-82.

2018. “Liberation and the Gothic in Carlos Solórzano’s Las manos de Dios.” In Latin American Gothic: Transposition, Hybridization, Tropicalization, eds. Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz, Routledge, 84-95. New York: Routledge.

2017. “Educating Cohesion: The Teacher as an Agent of the Post-Revolutionary State.” In Modern Mexican Culture: Critical Foundations,ed. Stuart A. Day, 107-22. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

2016. “Science and the (Meta)physical Body: A Critique of Positivism in the Vasconcelian Utopia.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 40(3): 534-59.

2016. “Unos anticonceptivos apocalípticos: Inconmensurabilidades semánticas entre la medicina y la religión en La Píldora maravillosa de Jesús Pavlo Tenorio.” Medicina y Humanidades: Revista de Medicina, Bioética y Filosofía 8: 83-94.

2016. “Robo Sacer: ‘Bare Life’ and Cyborg Labor Beyond the Border in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer.” Hispanic Studies Review 1: 15-29.

2016. “Santería and Resistance in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío’s Strawberry and Chocolate and Fernando Pérez’s Life is to Whistle.” Journal of Religion and Film 20(3): 1-34.

2016. “Intenciones enmascaradas en la pantalla plateada. El Santo y el mimetismo imperial.” Alambique: Revista Académica de Ciencia Ficción y Fantasía 4(1): 1-15.

  • Winner of the Eleventh Annual Jamie Bishop Memorial Award (Top article on the fantastic in the arts in a foreign language)

2016. “Una huella mexicana en el cine español: La naturaleza mágica y resistente en Biutiful de Alejandro González Iñárritu y El laberinto del fauno de Guillermo del Toro.” Millars: espai i historia 40(1): 99-122.

2016. “Imaginando comunidades en tensión: Elena Garro y el indigenismo.” Nocturnario 13.

2014. “Educating Social Hierarchies in Rosario Castellanos’s Balún Canán.” Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana 43(2):150-60.

2013. “Una objetividad subjetiva: Paradigmas coloniales en las observaciones botánicas de Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés y José de Acosta.” Ometeca 18: 122-37.