Gerard Aching Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese Ph.D. 1991 (Romance Studies), Cornell; B.A. 1982 (Political Science), California, Berkeley. Email:

Areas of Research/Interest: 19th and 20th-century Caribbean literatures and intellectual history; theories of modernism and modernity in Latin America; slavery and philosophy; visual regimes and politics in Caribbean popular cultures.

Select Publications:

Freedom From Liberation: Slavery and Literary Sensibility in Cuba (Current Book Project)

Masking and Power: Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean (Minnesota UP, 2002).

The Politics of Spanish American Modernismo: By Exquisite Design (Cambridge UP, 1997).

"Against ‘Library-Shelf Races’: José Martí’s Critique of Excessive Imitation” in Geo-Modernisms (Eds.) Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005), 151-69.

“Un impasse ideológico: Carnaval, protesta social y visibilidad en una nación postcolonial” Revista Iberoamericana 205 (2003): 863-79.

"Beyond Sites of Execution: Haiti and the Historical Imagination in C.L.R. James and Alejo Carpentier" in Sisyphus and Eldorado: Magical and Other Realisms in Caribbean Literature. (Ed.) Timothy J. Reiss (Africa World Press, 2002), 103-25.

Fellowships/Honors: Guggenheim Fellow (2003). University Research Challenge Fund, 2002-03, New York University, Theme: "Labor and Color Consciousness: Black Socialist Thought and Literature in the Caribbean, 1925-45; Howard Foundation Fellowship (Brown University), 1999-2000, Theme: Surrealism in the Caribbean in 1940's; Faculty Fellow, Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, Rutgers University, 1992-93, Theme: Transnationalism.