Esther Whitfield
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature:
Comparative Literature
Phone: +1 401 863 3277
Esther_Whitfield@Brown.EDU
Esther Whitfield's research focuses on Cuban culture of the post-Soviet period. She also writes on contemporary Latin American and Caribbean literature more broadly, and on Welsh writing in the Americas.
Biography
Esther Whitfield grew up in Cardiff, Wales. She received a B.A. in Modern Languages from Oxford University in 1994 and a Ph. D. in Romance Languages & Literatures from Harvard University in 2001. She taught for a year as a lecturer in Harvard's Program in History and Literature before joining the faculty of Brown's Department of Comparative Literature in 2002. She teaches courses on Latin American, Caribbean and European literature.
Interests
Esther Whitfield's book _Cuban Currency: The Dollar and 'Special Period' Fiction_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) explores how the emergence of export markets for Cuban culture is inscribed in contemporary fiction. Based on extensive interviews and archival research in Havana, it takes an integrated approach to the cultural, economic and social changes that have taken place there since the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, from which Cuba derived most of its economic support. It argues that, over the past decade, writers have both challenged and profited from new transnational markets for their work, in a move whose literary and ideological implications are far-reaching.
Whitfield is also editor of the critical edition of Antonio José Ponte's stories (Un arte de hacer ruinas; México: FCE, 2005) and co-editor with Jacqueline Loss of an anthology of Cuban short fiction in translation, _New Short Fiction from Cuba_ (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007). She has published several articles on contemporary Latin American fiction and Welsh diasporic literature.
Her second book project, "Remembering the Welsh of Patagonia," addresses recent representations of nineteenth-century Welsh emigration to Patagonia, Argentina, and the intersections of these with debates on nationalism, language rights and ethnic studies in both Wales and Argentina. Through a range of readings in Welsh, Spanish and English, the project proposes that contemporary recuperations of this historical episode are key to the fashioning of local, post-imperial identities.
Degrees
Ph.D., Harvard University
Awards
Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship, 2006-07
Affiliations
Latin American Studies Association
Modern Language Association
Teaching
Comparative Literature 181: Reading Revolution: Cuba from the Outside
Comparative Literature 142: Tales of Two Cities (Havana-Miami, San-Juan-New York)
Comparative Literature 142: Fictions of the Caribbean
Comparative Literature 81: The Colonial and Postcolonial Marvelous
Comparative Literature 81: Confession, Autobiography, Testimony
Comparative Literature 71: Latin America: The French Connection
Comparative Literature 51: Caribbean Re-writes
Funded Research
Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship, 2006-07, amount $32,750
Curriculum Vitae
