Date:
Location:
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.