Roundtable - Latin American Popular Culture

From crime fiction and film to poetry, music, and the novels that travel in translation, popular culture is where Latin America tells its stories, contests power, and imagines its futures. This roundtable brings together four writers and scholars to ask what “the popular” means today and who gets to define it. 

Dr. Alejandro Soifer (RSHA Visiting Fellow) is a Post-Doc at Western University (London, Canada), a novelist, journalist, and teacher whose public interviews include Yuri Herrera and Mariana Enriquez. 

Dr. Lucía Feuillet (CASS Global South Visiting Fellow) is an Assistant Professor at Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (Argentina) and the author and editor of several books, most recently including the edited collection Literatura, crisis y (neo)liberalismo (2026).

 Dr. Fabricio Tocco (CASS, SLLL and AILASA) is an academic, a novelist and a musician, who has published one novel and two monographs, including most recently Precarious Secrets (2025) that was adapted to the big screen and translated to Spanish.

 Emeritus Associate Professor Daniel Martín (CASS, SLLL) is an award-winning poet and novelist, and a researcher of the Spanish-speaking community in Australia. 

With their discussion moderated by Thomas Nulley-Valdés(CASS, SLLL), together they will explore how popular genres shape memory, identity, and dissent in Latin America. Open to scholars, students, and anyone interested in Latin America. 

SPEAKERS

Lucía Feuillet holds a PhD in Literary Studies and is a Lecturer in Literary Theory and Methodology at the National University of Córdoba (Argentina). She also holds a position as a researcher at the Research Centre of the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities. Her academic work focuses on contemporary Argentine literature, genre fiction—including sci fi, horror, gothic literature and new weird—and critical theory. She is the author of two books, Dinero y delito: la tradición materialista en la lectura/escritura pigliana del género policial (2011) and Interpretaciones del delito: para una hermenéutica materialista en la narrativa policial de Juan Carlos Martelli (2020). She has also co-edited academic volumes on contemporary literature, literary criticism, and cultural politics, and published articles in international peer-reviewed journals. Her recent research examines speculative imaginaries, hauntology, dystopian fiction, and the intersections between literature, political violence, and social transformation. She has received doctoral and postdoctoral research fellowships from Argentina's National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and has participated in international academic exchanges, including a visiting lectureship at the University of Granada. She is currently a CASS Global South Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, where she continues her research on contemporary Argentine speculative literature.=

Fabricio Tocco is a Senior Lecturer in Spanish at the ANU and the President of AILASA (Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia.). His first book, Latin American Detectives Against Power (Bloomsbury, 2022), was awarded the International Crime Fiction Book Prize. His second book, Precarious Secrets (University of Texas Press, 2025), was awarded the Australian Academy of the Humanities Publication Subsidy Scheme, and was adapted into the documentary film Secretos Precarios (SBS-on- Demand/Apple TV, 2025). It will be published in its Spanish translation by the Argentine press Prometeo. He is also the author of Parece diciembre (Buenos Aires and London: Equidistancias, 2025), a coming-of-age novel set against a backdrop of political turmoil.

Alejandro Soifer is a B.A. in Letters from the University of Buenos Aires and M.A. and Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Toronto. He is the author of more than seven books, including two non-fiction and four novels. With a prolific career in journalism and teaching, Soifer has also conducted public interviews with renowned writers, including Yuri Herrera (Toronto Public Library, 2019) and Mariana Enriquez (University of Toronto, 2024). His doctoral dissertation was adapted into a podcast episode for Canada’s public radio, CBC, titled “Ideas: In the Trenches.”

Thomas Nulley-Valdés is a literary scholar in Latin American Literature and World Literature theory. He is the author of McOndo Revisited (Bloomsbury 2023) and co-editor of the volume Chilean Literature as World Literature: 1990-2025 with Juan Poblete. His research has been published in Theory Now, Chasqui, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, JILAR, 1616: Anuario de literatura comparada, and The Literary Encyclopedia for which he is the Latin American Section Co-editor. He is Lecturer in Spanish Studies at the Australian National University.

Mario Daniel Martín is an Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at ANU. In addition to academic books and articles on the Spanish-speaking community in Australia and language teaching methodology, he has published 12 creative books in Spanish (4 novels, 4 volumes of poetry, 2 of short stories and 2 of theatre plays). More than 70 of his short stories and poems have appeared in literary and science fiction magazines and anthologies. He has been awarded national and international literary prizes. His latest novel Iridio Ennui vs The Boltzmann Brains is available at https://hdl.handle.net/1885/733721237