Wadda Ríos-Font
Professor (Barnard Affiliated Faculty)
Wadda Ríos-Font has a B.A. in Spanish Studies and English from the Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. Her specialization is peninsular literature and culture from 1800 to the present, with interests in cultural and literary history, class and gender in the cultural field, and transatlantic cultural exchange.
She was Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Brown University (1996-2005), and previously, Assistant Professor at the University of Rochester. She has held visiting appointments at the University of California at Berkeley, UCLA, and Rutgers University, among other institutions. Her most recent book, The Canon and the Archive: Configuring Literature in Modern Spain (Bucknell UP, 2004) queries the formation and constantly renegotiated definition of the concept of literature in modern Spain through critical consideration of texts from the early nineteenth-century folletín through the detective novel of the 1990s. She is also the author of Rewriting Melodrama: The Hidden Paradigm in Modern Spanish Theater (Bucknell, 1997), which chronicles the evolution of this dramatic genre from the early 1800s through the 1920s. Her work has also appeared in journals including Hispanic Review, Hispania, MLN, and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos; as well as in volumes such as the Cambridge History of Spanish Literature (Cambridge UP, 2005). Currently she is working on a book on crime and culture in nineteenth-century Spain, as well as in two shorter projects, on polysystemic relations between economics and literature in Restoration Spain, and on travel to the metropolis and the formulation of national identity in colonial Puerto Rico, 1815-1898.
Milbank Hall 208
wriosfont@barnard.edu
(212) 854-2061