College: King’s

Email: lsmt2@cam.ac.uk

Supervisor: Dr Geoffrey Kantaris and Dr Maite Conde (co-supervision)

Research Topic: Mytho-technics and the (Re-)Making of Sense in Latin American Vanguard Poetics

About

Before coming to Cambridge, Leo completed an undergraduate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia (receiving a starred First for his overall performance). In the academic year 2018-19, he undertook the MPhil in European, Latin American and Comparative Literature and Culture (passing with High Distinction). Leo also writes poems and is interested in creative-critical approaches to academic study.

Research                   

In tension with influential ontologies of technics (Heidegger, Gilbert Simondon, Jean Epstein), Leo’s work is guided by the principle that the poets of the Latin American vanguard—from Mário de Andrade to Magda Portal—are themselves neglected theorists of modernity. He adopts a ‘rear-guard’ view of the Latin American avant-garde; one that reconstructs the exchange of poetic forms and ideas in the 1920s and 30s, holding fast to emphases upon slowness, peripherality, aesthesis, that are papered over in Eurocentric theories of the avant-garde, often in thrall to Marinettian velocity. Leo gives voice to granular, material processes that shape transformations in technological experience and poetic form alike, tracing out gestures of sensual resistance against the backcloth of a hegemonic modernity and its underside, enduring coloniality. A particular line of inquiry, then, is prosodic, probing how different animations of poetic rhythm (especially unorthodox interpretations of vers libre) disclose divergent orientations in time and history.

By the unstable graft of myth and technics, Leo draws attention to their entanglement and proposes to work through their tensions and correspondences as a problem of sense/-making and, therefore, one that poetics responds to.

Scholarships/Prizes

At UEA, Leo won the Jarrold Prize for Highest Overall Performance on the degree. His MPhil at Cambridge was fully supported by an AHRC Studentship and his current doctoral work is funded by Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities.

Teaching

In Lent term 2022, Leo will be lecturing and supervising on PG1.

Publications

Temple, Leo (2020). ‘Que nos diluísse em materia de nojo: moeda viva e a (de)sacralização da casa-grande em Crônica da casa assassinada de Lúcio Cardoso’. Opiniães, (17), 318-339.

Other activities and roles

With Diego Azurdia, Leo is co-convening the Cambridge Hispanic and Lusophone Research Seminars, 2021-22