University of Virginia Spanish, Italian & Portuguese

Professor of Spanish

Research and Teaching Interests

• Colonial and Nineteenth-Century Latin American History and Literature

• Critical Race Studies (caste systems, folkbiology and human diversity, eugenics)

• Early Modern Brazil and Portugal

• Hemispheric American Studies

• Atlantic Studies

• Baroque and Neobaroque

• Enlightenments and Modernities

• Rhetoric and Poetics

• Early Modern Science and Philosophy (Italy, Spain, Portugal, England, France, Spanish America

Selected Publications

• Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America: A Postal Inspector’s Exposé. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, Dec. 2005. Reviewed in Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Virginia Quarterly, Latin American Research Review, New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Choice, Colonial Latin American Review, Dieciocho, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Revista Iberoamericana, Eighteenth-Century Studies.

• Sceptres and Sciences in the Spains: Four Humanists and the New Philosophy (ca. 1680-1740). Hispanic TRAC, vol. 17, administered by Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, Dec. 2000. U.S. Distributor: University of Chicago Press. Reviewed in Colonial Latin American Review, Calíope, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Dieciocho, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Virginia Quarterly, Eighteenth-Century Studies, International Philosophical Quarterly.

• Categories and Crossings: Critical Race Studies and the Spanish World, special issue of Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 10.1 (March 2009).

• “Primeval Whiteness: White Supremacies, (Latin) American History, and the Transamerican Challenge to Critical Race Studies,” in Teaching and Studying the Americas: Engaging Cultural Influences from Colonialism to the Present. Eds. Michael Emerson, Caroline Levander, and Anthony Pinn. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 109-138.

• “De la Historia literaria de España al Teatro histórico, jurídico y político de Cuba. Modernidad historiográfica y sujetividad ilustrada en dos archivos transatlánticos” (“From Historia literaria de España to Teatro histórico, jurídico y político de Cuba: Historiographical Modernity and Enlightenment Subjectivity in Two Transatlantic Archives”) (essay), La literatura ciencia cierta, eds. Leopoldo Bernucci and Tamara Williams. Juan de la Cuesta, 2010.

• “The Roots of Revolt in Late Viceregal Quito: Eugenio de Espejo Between Adam Smith and St. Rose.” Eds. Jeremy Robbins and Ann Mackenzie. Special issue of Bulletin of Spanish Studies 86. 7-8 (November-December 2009) (published Spring 2010): 143-55.

• “El drama de hacer patria. Negrofobia, judeofobia y modernidad criolla en Frutos de la educación (1830).” Eds. David Mauricio Solodkow and Juan Vitulli. Poéticas de lo criollo: inestabilidad semántica y heterogeneidad identitaria. La transformación del concepto ‘criollo’ en las letras hispanoamericanas. Buenos Aires: Editorial Corregidor, 2010. 265-286.

• “Entre lo transatlántico y lo hemisférico: Los proyectos raciales de Andrés Bello” [“Between the Transatlantic and the Hemispheric: Andrés Bello’s Racial Projects”]. Eds. Eyda Merediz and Nina Gerassi Navarro. Más allá de lo transatlántico, special issue of Revista Iberoamericana 75. 228 (julio-septiembre 2009): 719-735.

• “‘Country Dumb’ Down in Santo Domingo: ‘Rustiquez’ in Peguero’s Historia de la conquista de la Isla Española.” Eds. José R. Jouve-Martín and Renée Soulodre-La France. Constitución del Barroco, special issue, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 33.1 (Otoño 2008): 195-213.

• “Hearing Las Casas Write: Rhetoric and the Facade of Orality in Brevísima relación.” MLA Approaches to Teaching Bartolomé de las Casas. Eds. Santa Arias and Eyda Merediz. New York: MLA, 2008. 57-64.

• “Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the Pre-History of Race in Latin America: Reflections on Caste and Hegemony in Valle y Caviedes.” Afro-Hispanic Review 26. 2 (Fall 2007): 77-86.

• “Between Black and White: A Critical Race Theory Approach to Caste Poetry in the Spanish New World.” Comparative Literature 59.4 (Fall 2007): 269-293.

Current Research

• Race in [Latin]American [Con]Texts/Raza en [con]textos [hispano]Americanos (book manuscript in-progress)

• Aztecs, Incas, and Other White Men: A Hemispheric History of Hate (book manuscript in progress)

• “Ariana Crosses the Atlantic: Sarmiento’s Rhetoric of Water and Race” (essay)

• “About-Face: Baroque Modalities of Human Diversity and the (Post) Modern Retreat from Biological Race” (essay)

• “Old Testament, New World: The Curse of Ham and the Mark of Cain in Baroque Genealogies of Pre-Columbian Peoples” (essay)

• “Beyond Slavery in the Iberian Atlantic? Translatio Temporum and Racial Models of the Americas” (essay)

• “New World Exceptionalism and the Production of Alterity in _La grandeza Mexicana_” (essay), for Calíope special issue

• “From Wool to Wooly Hair: Race and the Atlantic Divide.” Oxford Handbook to the Literature of the U.S. South (essay)