The proposed book, Teaching the Literatures of the Hispanic Caribbean, is projected as a collection of essays by both established and emerging scholars that will help contextualize the literary traditions of the Hispanic Caribbean and guide teachers in the task of creating syllabi and guiding class discussion. Although some attention will be paid to pre-twentieth century literature—the introduction will offer a survey of the major works, trends, and movements of Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican literatures—the focus of the essays will be primarily on writing in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, as the most recent texts are present most often in the U. S. college and university curriculum.

The projected collection of twelve to fifteen essays on Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa (1909-1965) aims at examining the various mythologies and texts that obsessively rehearse Porfirio Rubirosa’s life and fame from disciplinary and theoretical frames that can include historical studies, literary studies, gender studies, critical race theory, transnational, diasporic and postcolonial studies, performance studies, and visual culture studies. Rubirosa’s career trajectory is situated within a particularly complex period of Dominican history: in the shadow of the Cold War and under the protection of Trujillo, Rubirosa invaded the international media imaginary, resituating Dominican marginality in the discourse of stardom and modernity. “A tireless presence at chic nightspots and watering holes, a keen race-car driver and polo player, a friend to the rich and infamous, a relentless pursuer of women with huge bank accounts,” the New York Times noted, “he went on a lifelong tear that ended, fittingly, with a spectacular car crash in 1965 after a night of heavy drinking at a Paris club.” Yet how can we critically approach and reengage the hyper-masculinity and problematically racialized subjectivity of a man who has come to represent the Dominican—and even international—“macho’s macho”?

José Martí: A Life is my on-going biography of the leader of the Cuban War of Independence, a man known as “the supreme hero of the Cuban experience”—“the embodiment of everything sacrosanct about the Cuban psyche.” The project seeks to chronicle Martí’s life against the complex background of his historical moment (1853-1895), but without privileging the revolutionary hero over the private man, the modernist writer, or the judicious critic of the burgeoning North American empire. Its point of departure is that the Martí of legend is a far less interesting man than the multitalented individual whose commitment and choices brought him to an early but glorious death.

Forthcoming edition of the poems of Dominican writer and politician Phyllis Shand Allfrey.

This book project is a multidisciplinary, comparative study that traces the connection between history, ecology, and Caribbean literatures and cultures throughout the 20th century through the prism of changing notions of what constitutes the nation. I look at how profound and often vertiginous environmental changes ushered by a variety of historical events—the collapse of the sugar industry, the shift from agrarian to tourism economies, urbanization and industrialization, deforestation and related natural disasters, and desertification—have turned Antillean geographies into unrecognizable landscapes, bringing the islands dangerously close to their carrying capacity. Using the concept of an ecological revolution—“an abrupt and qualitative break with the process of environmental and social change that had developed in situ” (Melville 12), I have selected a number of such “revolutionary” moments in 20th-century Caribbean ecological history as the basis for the chapters described below. Through the analysis of historical documents (maps, reports, legal cases), literary texts, paintings, and popular culture (particularly music) drawn from the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanic Caribbean, I examine how notions of the nation developed against the background of abrupt ecological changes gradually come to posit the fear of the disappearance of small nations and their peoples. As Walcott warns, “[a] morning could come in which governments might ask what happened not merely to the forests and the bays but to a whole people” (83).

This book project is a multidisciplinary, comparative study that looks at artist’s representations of the landscapes and peoples of the Caribbean in the period between the end of U.S. Civil War (1865) and the Spanish American War. My main focus is on how, through the nuances of representation of Caribbean landscapes and peoples during this period, we can read the complexity of responses to a rapidly changing political and economic landscape as the United States begins to encroach onto Caribbean territories still precariously controlled by European powers. Using a variety of multidisciplinary approaches, the project looks at the work of seven interconnected painters who worked in the Caribbean between 1865 and 1898—Frederic Church, Martin Johnson Heade, Camille Pissarro, Fritz Melbye, Francisco Oller, Paul Gauguin, and Winslow Homer. The multiplicity of gazes through which we come to view the Caribbean during these years reveals how wrought with discord, how laden with significance representation became during this crucial period. Each one of the artists included in the study reflects a view of the Caribbean as a portal to “America,” a vision that could encompass virginal landscapes, exotic peoples, flora, and fauna, and prodigious mineral and agricultural wealth while reflecting the local need to concretize borders, to carefully balance extra-territorial alliances, and narrow their definitions of local space so as to foment the development of a national consciousness—in the North as well as the South.

The project explores the literature written in the wake of the eruption of the Mont Pelée volcano and the destruction of the city of St. Pierre. From early texts like Marie Bally-Dufrénois’ Éruptions du Mont Pelé en 1902, lettres d'une fiancée to Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, it looks at the eruption as the before/after of Martinican literature.