Research interests

My work is broadly based in the cultural and political relations between the U.S. and the rest of the Americas, particularly Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America. The nineteenth century is my usual period focus, but I also write about contemporary works by U.S. Latinas and Latinos, whose experiences are deeply rooted in the history of the Americas. I am interested in the changing conditions of literary production and reception, as well as in the general question of how and why we make history. My current book project engages sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology to explore the changing ideologies surrounding Spanish-language usage in what is now the U.S., from the seventeenth century to the present.

Book

Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing was published in 2002 by Princeton University Press. It argues that Latinos are not newcomers in the United States by documenting a vast network of Spanish-language cultural activity in the nineteenth century. Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials and building on an innovative interpretation of poetry's cultural role, Ambassadors of Culture brings together poems, essays, and other writings from the borderlands of California and the Southwest as well as the cosmopolitan exile centers of New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. It reads these productions in light of broader patterns of cultural and political relations between the U.S. and Latin America, showing how ''ambassadors of culture'' such as Whitman, Longfellow, and Bryant propagated ideas about Latin America and Latinos through their translations, travel writings, and poems.

The book was selected for an Honorable Mention for the John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Book in American Studies in 2002 from the American Studies Association.

Essays in Books and Journals

• "Walt Whitman, Latino Poet," in Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass: Where the Future Becomes Present, eds. Michael Robertson and David Haven Blake (U Iowa Press, Iowa Whitman Series, 2008).
• "The Cafetal of María del Occidente and the Anglo-American Race for Cuba," forthcoming in The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange, ed. Meredith McGill (Rutgers University Press, 2008).
• "The Mercurial Space of 'Central' America: New Orleans, Honduras, and the Writing of the Banana Republic," in Hemispheric American Studies, eds. Caroline Levander and Robert S. Levine (Rutgers University Press, 2007).
• "The Once and Future Latino: Notes Toward a Literary History todavía para llegar," in Contemporary US Latino/a Literary Criticism, eds. Lyn Diloria Sandín and Richard Pérez (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
• "America," entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, eds. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (NYU Press, 2007). See and participate in the Keywords blog.
• "The Gulf of Mexico System and the 'Latinness' of New Orleans," American Literary History 18:4 (Fall 2006).
• "Subject to the Border: The Strange Case of José Agustín Quintero," in Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage V, ed.Kenya Dworkin-Mendez and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2006.
• "Hacia un mundo nuevo latino: los periódicos hispanos en los Estados Unidos a fines del siglo XIX," Revista Iberoamericana LXXII (enero-marzo 2006), no. 214. pp. 185-198.
• “Translation: A Key(word) into the Language of America(nists),” American Literary History 16:1 (Spring 2004).
• “Delta Desterrados: New Orleans, Mexico, and the Confederacy,” in Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies, eds. Jonathan Smith and Deborah Cohn, Duke University Press 2004.
• “Other Languages, Other Americas,” in The Blackwell Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865, ed. Shirley Samuels, Blackwell Press 2004.
• “Worlding American Studies” (co-authored with Rob Wilson and Susan Gillman), Comparative American Studies 2:3 (2004), 259-270.
• “Utopía Latina: The Ordinary Seaman in Extraordinary Times.” Modern Fiction Studies 49:1 (Spring 2003), 54-83.
• “The Occluded History of Transamerican Literature,” pp. 121-137 in Critical Latin American and Latino Studies, ed. Juan Poblete. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
• “Anonimo No More: Toward a Transnational Theory of Nineteenth-Century Poetic Practice,” pp. 80-95 in Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage IV, ed. José Aranda and Silvio Torres-Saillant. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002.
• “Feeling for the Fireside: Longfellow, Lynch, and the Topography of Poetic Power,” pp. 43-63 in Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, eds. Glenn Hendler and Mary Chapman. University of California Press, 1999.
• “El gran poeta Longfellow and a Psalm of Exile,” American Literary History 10.3 (Winter 1998), 395-427.
• "Facing the Nation: The Organic Life of La Cautiva," Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 30:1 (Winter 1996), 3-22.

Forthcoming New Work

• "Lexical Snacks at the Citizen Restaurant: A Response to Vicki Ruiz," ASA Presidential Address forum forthcoming in American Quarterly 60:2, March 2008.
• "Maria Gowen Brooks, In and Out of the Poe Circle," forthcoming in a special issue of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance,fall 2008.
• "Transnationalism," "Travel Writing," "José Quintero": essay-length entries in The Encyclopedia of Latino Literature, ed. Nicolás Kanellos, forthcoming 2009.

Current Research Projects

I am currently at work on two book projects, titled Bad Lengua: A Cultural History of Spanish in the United States and Bordering the Gulf: Routes of Latinidad from the Yucatán to La Florida. I continue to work on smaller editing projects relating to Spanish-language periodical culture in New Orleans, especially La Patria (1846-51) and El Mercurio (1911-1927). I am also on the editorial board of the New Literary History of America, to be published in 2009 by Harvard University Press.

Recent Honors and Awards

I received the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2005-06, spent at the Huntington Library.

Background

I did my undergraduate work at Swarthmore College and earned my PhD in Comparative Literature at Yale. Prior to coming to UCSC in 1996, I taught at the College of William & Mary. I have also taught in the past at the Bread Loaf School of English.