Search the faculty site
To contact a faculty expert, please call or email:
Alyssa Vine
Media Relations Manager
Phone: 212.854.2037
E-mail:
Wadda C. RÍos-Font
Professor of Spanish and Latin American Cultures
Chair of the Department of Spanish and Latin American Cultures
Wadda C. Ríos-Font, professor of Spanish and Latin American cultures, joined the Barnard faculty in 2005. She has taught at Brown University and the University of Rochester and has held visiting appointments at Berkeley, University of California, Los Angeles, and Rutgers.
Professor Ríos-Font presently serves as chair of the department of Spanish and Latin American cultures at Barnard, and is also affiliated with the comparative literature program. In addition, she teaches in the graduate program of the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Columbia.
Professor Ríos-Font's main academic specialization is Spanish peninsular literature and culture from 1800 to the present. Within this area, she focuses on issues of cultural and literary history, class and gender, and transatlantic cultural exchange.
Her most recent book, The Canon and the Archive: Configuring Literature in Modern Spain, examines the concept of literature in modern Spain through critical analysis of of texts which range from the early-nineteenth-century folletín to the detective novel of the 1990s. A previous monograph, Rewriting Melodrama: The Hidden Paradigm in Modern Spanish Theater, chronicles the evolution of this dramatic genre from the early 1800s through the 1920s. Professor Ríos-Font has also been published in journals including Hispanic Review, Hispania, MLN, and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and in the Cambridge History of Spanish Literature.
She is currently engaged in two major research projects. The first involves the relationship between different cultural fields in nineteenth-century Spain, and has already led to articles and courses on the semiotics of the construction of criminality and the early juridical system, and on the connection between literature and economics in the Bourbon Restoration. The second project looks at historical, political, economic, and cultural/literary exchanges between Spain and Puerto Rico during the late Spanish Empire (1815-1898), examining their bearing on early formulations of national identity in colonial Puerto Rico.
Selected Publications
The Canon and the Archive: Configuring Literature in Modern Spain (Bucknell University Press, 2004)
Rewriting Melodrama: The Hidden Paradigm in Modern Spanish Theater (Bucknell University Press, 1997)
Professor of Spanish and Latin American Cultures, Chair of the Department of Spanish and Latin American Cultures
Barnard College
212.854.2061
EDUCATION:
B.A., Johns Hopkins University
M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University
RELATED LINKS:
Department of Spanish and Latin American Cultures
SPECIALIZATIONS:
Cultural history of modern Spain (1800-present)
Literary historiography
Popular & noncanonical literature
Nineteenth-century transatlantic relations