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Leo Temple’s research seeks to reconstruct the intellectual and social histories that underwrite the evolution of poetic form in Latin America. 

Academic interests

Leo Temple’s academic interests include:

• Modern Latin American poetry and poetics – late nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially the vanguard period
• Lusophone poetry and comparative poetics
• Postcolonial history and theory
• Media theory (especially with regards to the history of technology)
• Intersections between poetic and social forms
• Experimental criticism.

Degrees obtained

• BA, University of East Anglia.
• MPhil, Cantab.

Awards and prizes

• Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities, 2020-2024.
• Cambridge Arts and Humanities Research Council DTP Studentship, 2018.
• Jarrold’s Prize for English Literature and Creative Writing, UEA, 2016.

Biography

Before commencing his doctorate at Cambridge, Leo completed an MPhil at the same university in European, Latin American and Comparative Literatures and Cultures (2019). He also holds a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia (2016).

Leo’s doctoral dissertation, ‘Vital Mechanisms’ (1921-1931), charted the changing role of technology in the Latin American vanguard imagination. Drawing upon literary movements in Brazil, Mexico and Peru, the thesis moves from technological figuration of modern optimism to the melancholy machines of the end of the decade, coinciding with economic and political turbulence and increased sensitivity to colonial legacies. The mournful reimagining of mechanisation provides a new path into emergent literary forms in Latin America as well as a situated critique of technological development at the intersection of postcolonial and media history.

His next research project examines the last abolition of slavery in the Americas – achieved with Brazil’s Lei Áurea (1888) – and the effects of its belated implementation on abolitionist poetry, which slid from its origins in the Romantic tradition. As well as exposing social tensions underpinning Romanticism’s decline, the project aims to shows how poets appropriated ‘modern’ poetic styles to make sense of the so-called ‘state of delay’ – as with João da Cruz e Sousa’s Baudelairean abolitionism, convicting the decay – not the dawn – of modernity.

Other interests

Fishes, football, wild swimming, postpunk.