Alejandro Martínez received his PhD in Spanish and Portuguese from Princeton University in 2023. He is currently Assistant Professor and Director of Archives and Culture at Universidad Diego Portales (UDP) in Santiago, Chile. In this role, he is responsible for the intellectual and strategic direction of a university unit that brings together archival collections, academic research, and public cultural programming. His work is grounded in the idea that archives are not merely repositories of the past, but spaces of critical intervention—platforms from which to question, imagine, and shape the present.
Based at the Biblioteca Nicanor Parra, Martínez leads a multidisciplinary team that develops exhibitions, film series, lectures, editorial projects, and workshops. These initiatives aim to activate the university’s documentary collections—such as the presidential archive of Ricardo Lagos and the literary archive of Rodrigo Lira—through curatorial, pedagogical, and artistic practices. Under his direction, the program articulates a vision of archives and culture as tools for critical thinking, symbolic production, and collective debate. He also forges strategic partnerships with institutions in Chile and abroad, situating UDP’s cultural and archival work in broader regional and global conversations.
His research explores the intersections of literature, visual culture, and archives, with a focus on expanded poetry, Cold War politics, and documentary practices in Latin America. Martínez’s first book project, Poesía expandida. Artefactos poéticos, medios y participación en Chile durante la Guerra Fría (1952-1989), is based on his doctoral dissertation and examines how Chilean poets and artists like Nicanor Parra, Juan Pablo Langlois, Guillermo Deisler, and Cecilia Vicuña used expanded poetry as a form of imaginative response to Cold War tensions. Through an analysis of diverse media—including urban interventions, artist’s books, and performances—the project argues that expanded poetry fostered political imagination and collective participation in the context of Chile’s neo-avant-garde.
His second book project, Animating the Real: A Radical History of Latin American Documentary Animation, investigates how Latin American animated cinema has engaged with reality as a form of documentary, focusing on film archives in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Colombia. This research traces the ways animation has been used to explore historical remnants and confront political realities.
Martínez is also co-leading the project Reckoning with the Real: Transmedial Documentary in Latin America with Thomas Matusiak (University of Miami). This interdisciplinary initiative examines how artists, filmmakers, and writers in Latin America engage with documentary aesthetics to address urgent socio-political crises, such as far-right movements, migrant issues, and environmental destruction. The project includes a series of virtual workshops, an international conference, an exhibition, and the publication of a peer-reviewed volume.
Before joining Universidad Diego Portales, Martínez served as Assistant Professor at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, and Teaching Assistant at Princeton University. He has organized numerous academic events, exhibitions, and forums in the United States, Chile, and Venezuela. His work has been published in Anales de Literatura Chilena, América sin nombre, and Perífrasis, among other leading journals.