Ph.D. Brown University (1974). Chancellor's Professor of Spanish, Chair of the Department. Modernismo, Modernity, and the Development of Spanish American Literature (1998); Rubén Dario y la búsqueda romántica de la unidad: El recurso modernista de la tradición esotérica (an augmented version of the earlier work, translation with the assistance of the author, 1986); Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity: The Modernist Recourse to Esoteric Tradition (1983).
My career began at Brown University, where I received my Master’s and Ph.D. degrees. After leaving Brown, I lived two years in Mexico, an experience which rekindled the excitement I had felt when living in Seville, Spain, during my junior year. I then taught for several years at Indiana University and came to Vanderbilt in 1987.
My primary area of research is Spanish American poetry. I am currently working on a book-length study of the poetry of Delmira Agustini, for which I was awarded a year-long fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Agustini is a late Modernist who is known almost as much for her short and tumultuous life as for her creative and erotic verse. In this project I explore the relationship between Agustini’s innovative poetic discourse and the changing gender roles and sexual mores of the day. I also examine the unusual way that Agustini’s writing builds upon the tradition begun by earlier Modernists of questioning and critiquing predominant ideological, cultural, and discursive conventions. Agustini goes further; she rewrites the sexual metaphors that are embedded within the language of literary paternity and produces a provocative vision of female empowerment.
My Modernism, Modernity, and the Development of Spanish American Literature analyzes the Modernist movement in Spanish America and underscores its confrontation with the social, political, and philosophic alterations brought about by the arrival of modernity to Spanish America. By exploring how Modernist characteristics are related to these radical changes, the study shows Modernism’s centrality to the development of modern Spanish American Literature. This work grew out of the chapter on Modernist poetry that I wrote for the three-volume Cambridge History of Latin American Literature.
Much of my earlier research also focused on Modernism. Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity was published by the University of Texas Press and later, in an augmented version in Spanish, by Fondo de Cultura Económica. In addition have authored various articles on the poetry of César Vallejo and contemporary Spanish American prose fiction.
