Professor Wadda Rios-Font will present "Ultramar, Ultratumba: Spiritism, Literature, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico."
Wadda C. Ríos-Font (B.A., Johns Hopkins, 1985; Ph.D., Harvard, 1991) is Professor and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Latin American Cultures at Barnard College, and affiliated faculty of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Columbia University. Her main academic specialization is Spanish literature and culture from 1800 to the present. Particular areas of inquiry have been: the interrelationship between different cultural systems—the literary, juridical, economic, and political fields—in modern Spanish society; literary historiography and processes of canonization, especially as affected by gender, class, and institutional constraints; transatlantic exchanges and the semiotics of national formation in Puerto Rico and Spain, after the breakdown of the Spanish empire. Prof. Ríos-Font is the author of two books, Rewriting Melodrama: The Hidden Paradigm in Modern Spanish Theater (Bucknell UP, 1997), and The Canon and the Archive: Configuring Literature in Modern Spain (Bucknell UP, 2004).
