Ryan's guests for this episode are Heather J. Allen, Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Mississippi, and Andrew R. Reynolds, Professor of Spanish at West Texas A&M University. Allen and Reynolds are co-editors of the collection Latin American Textualities: History, Materiality, and Digital Media, published in December 2018 by the University of Arizona Press. The collection provides a venue for scholars working in the emerging field of "textual studies," with essays on cultural artifacts ranging from grammar manuals and newspaper articles to (as the editors put it) "items we might consider newcomers or even interlopers in the textual world," including phonographs, "costume books," postcards, publishing catalogs, and virtual databases. In the collection and in the interview, Allen and Reynolds make the case for what a Latin American perspective can bring to this (still Anglo-centric) field; discuss how textual studies can open up new ways of thinking about colonization, modernization, and globalization; and describe the pedagogical possibilities and challenges created by the digitization of archival texts.
