The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature

The event is the presentation of the project of a new history of Cuban literature, edited by Vicky Unruh and Jacqueline Loss, under a new conceptual framework. The editors will discuss the reach of this forthcoming new history (currently under the final steps of production) and the conceptual threads that guide it and the bases of critical contributions, while contributors who participated in the volume will present some of the materials and reflect on the experience of working under the new conceptual framework. 

Speaker(s) name and bio:

Vicky Unruh, Professor Emerita at the University of Kansas, specializes in Latin American narrative, theatre, and literary-intellectual culture. She is the author of Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encounters (U of California P, 1994) and Performing Women and Modern Literary Culture in Latin America (U of Texas P, 2006); co-editor, with Michael Lazzara, of Telling Ruins in Latin America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); coordinator of a special issue on Work for PMLA (October 2012) and, with Guillermina De Ferrari, co-editor of a dossier on Cuba’s Leonardo Padura for A Contracorriente (2015). Her numerous articles have appeared in a wide range of refereed journals and edited books, including essays on Cuban narrative, theatre, film, and literary culture. She is also the recipient of several research, teaching, and mentoring awards. 

Jacqueline Loss is a professor of Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. She is author of Dreaming in Russian. The Cuban Soviet Imaginary (2013) and Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America: Against the Destiny of Place (2005) and co-editor of Caviar with Rum: Cuba-USSR and the Post-Soviet Experience (with José Manuel Prieto, 2012) and New Short Fiction from Cuba (with Esther Whitfield, 2007). Her translation of Jorge Mañach's An Inquiry into Choteo was published by Linkgua in 2018. Her essays and translations have appeared in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Nepantla, Chasqui, Latino and Latina Writers, New Centennial Review, Bomb, Transnational Screens, Kamchatka, The Global South, Brooklyn Rail, The Massachusetts Review, among other publications. She is currently co-directing a film entitled Finotype with Juan Carlos Alom. 

Roberto Ignacio Díaz is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at USC. Professor Díaz researches Latin American literary and cultural history with a focus on transatlantic relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has written on multilingualism in Spanish American literature and on the prose of Borges. His book Unhomely Rooms: Foreign Tongues and Spanish American Literature (Bucknell University Press, 2002) is an inquiry of the tradition of national or Spanish American literature written in another languages, besides Spanish. He is presently at work on a book-length study of opera in Latin America.

Marta Hernández Salván is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Hispanic Studies Department at University of California, Riverside where she specializes in contemporary Caribbean cultural production; other interests include postmarxism, psychoanalysis, critical theory and film. Her monograph Minima Cuba: Heretical Poetics and Power in Post-Soviet Cuba (SUNY Press, 2015) explores the exhaustion of the allegorical and melancholic rhetoric of the Cuban Revolution, and the poetics of irony developed in the current biopolitical era. She is co-editor of Asedios a lo increado: Nuevas perspectivas sobre Lezama Lima (Madrid: Verbum, 2015) and she has published numerous articles on Cuban cultural production and poetry in The New Centennial Review, Revista Hispánica Moderna, and Romance Quarterly among others.  

Cost: Free and Open to the Public