Research

Research interests

My work is broadly based in the cultural and political relations between the U.S. and the rest of the Americas, particularly Mesoamerica and the Caribbean/Gulf coast. The nineteenth century is my usual period focus, but I also write about contemporary works by U.S. Latinas and Latinos, whose experiences are deeply rooted in the history of the Americas. I direct the Latino Literary Cultures Project/Proyecto culturas literarias latinas, an initiative of the Chicano/Latino Research Center at UCSC.

I am interested in the changing conditions of literary production and reception, as well as in the general question of how and why we make history. My current book project engages sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology to explore the changing ideologies surrounding Spanish-language usage in what is now the U.S., from the seventeenth century to the present.

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Book

Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing was published in 2002 by Princeton University Press. It argues that Latinos are not newcomers in the United States by documenting a vast network of Spanish-language cultural activity in the nineteenth century. Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials and building on an innovative interpretation of poetry's cultural role, Ambassadors of Culture brings together poems, essays, and other writings from the borderlands of California and the Southwest as well as the cosmopolitan exile centers of New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. It reads these productions in light of broader patterns of cultural and political relations between the U.S. and Latin America, showing how ''ambassadors of culture'' such as Whitman, Longfellow, and Bryant propagated ideas about Latin America and Latinos through their translations, travel writings, and poems.

The book was selected for an Honorable Mention for the John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Book in American Studies in 2002 from the American Studies Association.

 

 

 

Essays in Books and Journals

Forthcoming

  • "The Fall of Tenochtitlán" and "Two Years Before the Mast" in A New Literary History of America, forthcoming in September from Harvard University Press.
  • "Tracking the First Latino Novel: Un matrimonio como hay muchos (1849) and Transnational Serial Fiction," forthcoming in Serial Fiction in U.S. Periodicals, ed. Patricia Okker.
  • “Mexican/American: The Making of Borderlands Print Culture,” forthcoming 2010 in US Popular Print Culture, 1860-1920, ed. Christine Bold (Oxford UP, History of Popular Print Culture series).
  • Worlding America: Spaces, Scales, Languages” (co-authored with Susan Gillman), in preparation for A Companion to American Literary Studies, eds. Levine and Levander (Blackwell).
  • “What Was the First Latino Novel? Two New Candidates,” essay in preparation.

Reviews

  • Review of María de Guzmán, Spain’s Long Shadow, in MLN: Hispanic Issue (Spring 2007).
  • Review of Héctor Calderón, Narratives of Greater Mexico, in Latino Studies 5:1 (Spring 2007).
  • Review of Rodrigo Lazo, Writing to Cuba and Robert Aguirre, Informal Empire, in American Literature 78:4 (December 2006), 889-91.
  • Review of Anna Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere, in Studies in American Fiction 33:1 (Spring 2005), 120-22.
  • Review of Nicolás Kanellos and Helvetia Martell, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960, in American Periodicals 6 (2003).

Current Research & Editing Projects

I am currently at work on two books, in this order: Bad Lengua: A Cultural History of Spanish in the United States and Bordering the Gulf: Routes of Latinidad from the Yucatán to La Florida. I also continue to work on smaller editing projects relating to Spanish-language periodical culture in New Orleans, especially the newspaper La Patria (1846-51), where I have found what is arguably the first Latino novel, and the monthly illustrated magazine Mercurio (1911-1927). I was also on the editorial board of the New Literary History of America, to be published in September 2009 by Harvard University Press.

Recent Honors and Awards

I received the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2005-06, spent at the Huntington Library.

Upcoming talks and travels

Background

I did my undergraduate work at Swarthmore College and earned my PhD in Comparative Literature at Yale. Prior to coming to UCSC in 1996, I taught at the College of William & Mary. I have also taught in the past at the Bread Loaf School of English.

 

this page last modified July 13, 2009

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