Elena Machado Sáez is a Professor of English at Bucknell University. She recently published the article, “Blackout on Broadway: Affiliation and Audience in In the Heights and Hamilton,” in a special issue of Studies in Musical Theater. Her essay, “Generation MFA: Neoliberalism and the Shifting Cultural Capital of U.S. Latinx Writers” came out in the journal Latino Studies and her chapter on “Bodega Sold Dreams: Middle-Class Panic and the Crossover Aesthetics of In the Heights” appears in Dialectical Imaginaries: Materialist Approaches to U.S. Latino/a Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (2018). Dr. Machado Sáez’s current research focuses on how U.S. Latinx writers negotiate intimacy and politics on the social media platform of Twitter.

She is author of Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction (University of Virginia Press 2015). The book analyzes historical fiction by Caribbean diasporic authors in Britain, Canada and the United States as part of a global literary trend that addresses the relationship between ethnic writers and their audiences. Machado Sáez argues that the novels address the problematic of intimacy and ethics in relation to readership by focusing on how gender and sexuality represent sites of contestation in the formulation of Caribbean identity and history.

Dr. Machado Sáez is also coauthor of The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2007), which discusses how Cuban-American, Dominican-American, and Puerto Rican literatures challenge established ideas about the relationship between politics and the market.