His research and teaching focus on 19th-century Latin American literature, media history, visual culture, and race studies. He is the author of Cuando lo nuevo conquistó América. Prensa, moda y literatura en el siglo XIX (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2013), the recipient of the Latin American Studies Association's "Premio Iberoamericano," an international prize awarded to the best book on Latin America in the social sciences and humanities published in Spanish or Portuguese. He is at work on a book entitled Passing as Open Secret: Race and Fictions of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Cuba.