A native of Dublin, Ireland, Professor Clayton studied Modern Languages (Spanish & German) at Oxford University, then moved to the US, where she received her PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Princeton University in 2003. She taught Latin American and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 2002 until 2012, when she joined Brown as Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature.
Her research and teaching range over three distinct but often interrelated areas. First and foremost, modern poetry (in Europe and the Americas), with a particular interest in modernist and avant-garde aesthetics and in interdisciplinary encounters between poetry, the visual arts (painting, photography, sculpture, film), and dance. Her first book, Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity (University of California Press, 2011), connected the Peruvian Vallejo and his Latin American contemporaries to a broader international panorama of experimentation in literature and the arts. She has also published articles on associated figures of Latin American modernity such as Carlos Oquendo de Amat, Oliverio Girondo, Manuel Maples Arce, José Carlos Mariátegui and others in journals and edited volumes.
Her second area of specialization, and the subject of her current book-project, Articulations: Dancing Across Modernities, is the role of dance as both image and practice in the international avant-gardes. Tracing the movements of dancers across the stages, screens, canvases, and essays of Europe and the Americas, she explores dance as a practice of world-making, a vehicle of cultural circulation and connection, and a mode of critical thought in modernity. She has published essays drawn from or growing out of this project in journals such as Modernism/Modernity, Modernist Cultures, Dance Research Journal, and the Revista de estudios hispánicos, and in edited volumes such as the Routledge Companion to 20th and 21st Century Latin American Cultural Forms.
Her third area of interest is modern and contemporary Latin American narrative. She has published essays on Juan Carlos Onetti, Ricardo Piglia, Roberto Bolaño in a variety of edited volumes, and she regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate seminars on contemporary Latin American writing and the visual arts through the intertwined lens of literary analysis, interdisciplinary study, and critical theory. At the PhD level she frequently oversees projects on modern and contemporary Latin American literature (poetry, narrative, theater, and film), often in conversation with world literary studies, eco-humanities, gender studies, translation studies, and performance.
She is currently serving as coordinator for the Flashpoints series at Northwestern University Press, as well as on the boards of various journals in Latin American studies and comparative literature.
