Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Literature and Culture. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Comparative Literature and serves on the Executive Committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media, and the Executive Board of UC Cuba. His work emphasizes the connections between Argentine, Cuban, and U.S. literature, the history of media and technology, sound studies, linguistic anthropology, computational (digital) humanities and new media studies. His work has been featured in Cultural Critique, La Habana Elegante, The Journal of Musicology, PMLA, Representations, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Sounding Out!, Variaciones Borges, and others. His book, Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas (FlashPoints at Northwestern University Press, 2017) was shortlisted for the Modernist Studies First Book Prize and was the subject of a forum at Syndicate. The book investigates the co-evolution of radio and the novel in Argentina, Cuba, and the United States, charting the rise and fall of populism and state socialism, and how authors in these countries began to re-conceive novel writing as an act of listening in order to shape the creation and understanding of the vox populi.
From 2020-2022, Professor McEnaney will be a Mellon New Directions Fellow with an emphasis in cultural analytics. He is also at work on a book about textual and musical experiments with tape technology in the late 1960s and their consequences for testimonial writing, rock nacional , electronic music, and audiobooks in the Americas. Before returning to Berkeley, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. While at Cornell, Professor McEnaney also founded the Latin American Journals Project, an online archive and hub of digitized literary journals and newspapers from throughout Latin America and the Hispanophone Caribbean. The aim of this project is to increase access to and work with these extraordinary journals for people across the world. (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley)
