About

Felipe Martínez-Pinzón’s research works on the junctions between nation, cosmopolitanism and the tropics in 19th century and 20th century Latin America. His research interests include the histories and representations of tropical nature and the literary and material cultures of Romanticism in Spanish America. He is currently working on two projects. One on the question of origins in post-Independence Latin American Romantic literature (ethnic origin as legitimacy; originality as copy, genius and pose; myths of origin in the historical novel, silenced origins in gothic literature; the origins of national literatures). The other, a cultural history of the Musa Paradisiaca (both the banana and the plantain) in Tropical America from Independence to the Present.

He has published a monograph on elite representations of warm climate in 19th century Colombia (Una cultura de invernadero). He has co-edited three volumes, one on the foundational relations between war, literature and geography in Latin America (with Javier Uriarte, Entre el humo y la niebla);  a second one on the connections between sketches of manners and cosmopolitan imaginations in Iberian America (With Kari Soriano Salkjelsvik, Revisitar el costumbrismo); and a third one about literary and cultural representations of 20th century Amazonia (with Javier Uriarte, Intimate Frontiers). In 2020, with Universidad de los Andes and Universidad del Rosario (Colombia), he published a reedition of José María Vergara y Vergara’s panoramic collection of skteches of types and manners Museo de cuadros de costumbres y variedades (1866). In 2021 the University of North Carolina Press published his second monograph Patricios en contienda: cuadros de costumbres, reformas liberales y representación del pueblo en Hispanoamérica (1830-1880)