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Vicky Unruh

Vicky Unruh, Professor and Chair, received her B.A. and M.A.T. from Antioch College and her Ph.D. in Spanish American Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. Her teaching and research encompass the literary and intellectual culture of Spanish America from the late nineteenth century until the present, with particular attention to narrative, theatre, and performance; the interwar avant-gardes in Latin America; and Cuban literature and cultural life. Her books include Telling Ruins in Latin America (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009; co-edited with Michael J. Lazzara), a collection of critical essays on the contending cultural stories generated by ruins in turn-of-the-millennium Latin America); Performing Women and Modern Literary Culture in Latin America (U of Texas Press, 2006); and Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encounters (U of California Press, 1994). Her chapters and articles have appeared in critical collections in the U.S. and abroad and in Cuadernos Americanos, Discurso Literario, Hispania, Hispanic Review, Latin American Literary Review, Latin American Research Review, Latin American Theatre Review, Modern Drama, PMLA, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Revista Iberoamericana, Romance Quarterly, Siglo XX/Twentieth Century, and Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature. She has received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) University Fellowship and research support from the Tinker and Danforth foundations and from the KU Hall Center for the Humanities and the Center for Twentieth-Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. At KU she has received the Louise Byrd Graduate Educator Award, the Self-Fellowship Graduate Mentor Achievement Award, and the Center for Teaching Excellence Recognition for Graduate Teaching. She has served on the editorial boards of PMLA and Latin American Research Review and currently serves on the editorial board of the Revista Iberoamericana. Unruh’s current book project focuses the critical recasting of the discourses of the Cuban Revolution (for example on work, education, and solidarity) in turn-of-the-millennium Cuban cultural production, particularly literature and film. Dissertators working with Unruh in recent years have focused on such topics as critical representations of the body in contemporary Cuban and Mexican fiction, film, and performance; corporality, gastronomy, and identity in Cuban and Cuban American fiction, essays, film, theatre, and performance of the 1980s and 1990s; melancholy and nostalgia in late twentieth century Argentine theatre; women writers in Pinochet’s and post-Pinochet Chile; the outsider in Argentine fiction and film (1980-1996); and racial hybridity and the vanguards in Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Brazilian fiction and poetry. Topics under investigation by current doctoral advisees include cultural representations of the Andean diaspora; critical recastings of discourses of race and ethnicity in contemporary Cuba; cityscapes in turn-of-the-millennium Mexican and Cuban narrative and film; and discourses of democracy in Spanish American modernista narrative. In recent years, Unruh has also served as an external reader for dissertations on Latin America’s avant-gardes by doctoral candidates at Johns Hopkins University, Rutgers University, and Columbia University.