Rodrigo LazoAssociate Professor, English Associate Dean of Undergraduate Study |
|
|
Research Interests |
Hemispheric American Studies; Nineteenth-Century; Latino Studies and the Americas; Cuba; Immigrant Literature | |
|
Research Abstract |
My research explores contexts that complicate the traditional division between American Studies (nation) and Latin American Studies (region). This approach, best described as Hemispheric American Studies, is highly interdisciplinary and multilingual. In keeping with this goal of seeking the intricate connections between people and places in the hemisphere, my current book project is a study of Spanish-language materials published in Philadelphia and New York from the 1790s to the 1830s. This is a literary and intellectual history that recovers the conditions under which men of letters from different parts of the hemisphere interacted to create a variety of books and periodicals. Tentatively titled, “Constituting the Americas: Filadelfia and Spanish-Language Print Culture in the United States, 1794-1833,” this book examines how the spatial and racial influences on nation-formation overlapped with the belief in the Americas as a distinct area from Europe. While my work is informed and in dialogue with Latino Studies, I seek to emphasize a radical difference between today's commercialized ethnic identities and the social and economic conditions that led to print culture production in the past. Similar preoccupations inspired my first book, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States, a study of newspapers, pamphlets, and books published by Cuban exiles in the antebellum New York. Deploying a critical framework that considered both Cuban cultural influences and the US political arena, Writing to Cuba showed how writers produced writing that circulated transnationally from the United States to Cuba and back. While I am primarily a scholar of nineteenth-century writing, I also teach and periodically write about contemporary Latino literature and immigration narratives. My recent courses include “Imagining the Americas," “Latino Literature and the Archive,” and “Immigrant Fictions.” I am on the steering committee of UC-Cuba, an initiative to promote research about the island. In addition, I am currently working with faculty in numerous departments to develop a multilingual master’s/Ph.D. program on The Americas. Before coming to UC Irvine, I worked as a staff writer at The Miami Herald. |
|
| Publications |
Book: Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States. University of North Carolina Press, 2005. |
|
|
Selected Articles: "Oscar Hijuelos, Writer of Work," in Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Criticism. Edited by Lyn Di Orio Sandin and Richard Perez. 2007. |
||
| "La Famosa Filadelfia: The Hemispheric American City and Constitutional Debates," In Hemispheric American Studies. Edited by Caroline Levander and Robert S. Levine. 2008. | ||
| "Los Filibusteros: Cuban Writers in the United States and Deterritorialized Print Culture" American Literary History 15 (January 2003): 87-106. | ||
| "Filibustering Cuba: Cecilia Valdés and a Memory of Nation in the Americas," American Literature 74 (March 2002): 1-30. | ||
| "'So Spanishly Poetic': Moby-Dick's Doubloon and Latin America," in Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby-Dick, ed. John Bryant, Mar K. Bercaw, and Timothy Marr. (Kent State, 2005) | ||
| Grants | National Endowment for the Humanities, 2001-2002 | |
| Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, 1997 | ||
| Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 2005 | ||
|
Professional Societies |
Modern Language Association American Studies Association Latin American Studies Association Melville Society |
|
| Link to this profile | http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5139 | |
| Last updated | 08/06/2009 | |