Wadda Ríos-Font, Professor and Chair, Spanish and Latin American - Cultures, Columbia University - “Ultramar, Ultratumba: Spiritism, Literature, and Politics in the Spain-Puerto Rico Colonial Relationship”

Date: 

Monday, March 31, 2014, 5:00pm to 7:00pm

Location: 

Barker Center, Kresge Room 114

 Department of Romance Languages and Literatures (light reception to follow)

Professor Ríos-Font’s interests:Spanish literature and culture 1800-present; interrelationship between literature, law, economics, and politics in modern Spanish society; literary historiography and processes of canonization as affected by gender, class, and institutional constraints; transatlantic exchanges and the semiotics of national formation in Puerto Rico and Spain after the breakdown of the Spanish empire.

 

Books:  Rewriting Melodrama: The Hidden Paradigm in Modern Spanish Theater (Bucknell UP, 1997)

The Canon and the Archive: Configuring Literature in Modern Spain (Bucknell UP, 2004).

 

In 2009, Prof. Ríos-Font was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a Barnard Presidential Research Fellowship, to devote sabbatical time to her third book, Quasimodo’s Bell: Puerto Rican National Culture and the Spanish Empire, 1808-1898. The manuscript addresses the question of Puerto Rico’s “failure” to develop a significant independence movement during the last century of Spanish domination; it analyzes the enduring ties to the metropolis that determined this circumstance, as well as the development and representation of a conception of nationality that separated cultural identity from the reality of the nation-state.