Overview
Juan-Pablo Albornoz is a Fulbright Scholar and PhD Candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. He holds an MA in Philosophy from Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, and an MA with Distinction in Contemporary Literature, Theory, and Culture from King's College London. His research interests involve the exploration of how novels theorize concepts and how they can operate as experiments that capture a sense of history or contemporary life.
His dissertation, The Network Buzz: Fantasies of Connection and Disconnection in Contemporary Speculative Fiction, examines the rise of the network as a buzzword in academic and popular circles beginning around 1990, and how this rise both shaped and was shaped by contemporary speculative fiction, technology, and media. Reading works by Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Jennifer Egan, Kim Stanley Robinson, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Colson Whitehead, and Kazuo Ishiguro, his project theorizes how paranoia, obsolescence, and effervescence work as affects or intensities that structure how we experience the constant buzzing of digital and analogical networks and that inform our attachments to promises and fantasies of connection and disconnection.
His research has appeared in journals such as Contemporary Literature (forthcoming March 2027), the Journal of Open Humanities Data, and Spanish-language outlets including El Malpensante.
Research Focus
- Literary Theory
- 20 and 21st Century
- Narrative Theory and the Novel
- Science and Speculative Fiction
- Affect Theory
- Media Studies