Faculty & Staff
Ángel A. Rivera
Associate Professor
Coordinator of Foreign Language Sufficiencies
Faculty Listing
Office: Salisbury Laboratories, 16
Phone: +1-508-831-5779
Fax: +1-508-831-5932
arivera@wpi.edu
Related Information
Educational Background
- B.A., University of Puerto Rico, 1983
- M.A., University of Puerto Rico, 1987
- Ph.D., Rutgers University, 1994
Research & Teaching Interests
Spanish-American literature; history and culture; Third-World literatures; Spanish-language teaching and innovations in foreign-language pedagogy
IQP Advising Interests
History; literature; foreign policy; introducing new teaching materialsResearch
For the past few years, I have been conducting research on nineteenth and twentieth-century Spanish Caribbean literature and its connection to border or frontier theories. That is, I explore how Caribbean traditional modes of representation have been shattered, and later restructured due to significant changes in cultural, literary, and historical contexts. My focus is on studying how marginal and hegemonic groups view themselves (Caribbean male intellectuals and women writers) within those borders, and devise new representational structures for their survival or enfranchisement under threatening conditions.
Among the topics of interest to my research are: Modernity and modernization, the genders of modernity, literary strategies used in the construction of a national and personal subjectivity, the role of the intellectual and its relationship to literary discourses, travel literatures in the context of the Caribbean, syncretic religious practices, the stranger, gender representation strategies, and consumer cultures.
Among the authors I have studied are: Carmela Eulate Sanjurjo (Puerto Rico), Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (Puerto Rico), Eugenio María de Hostos (Puerto Rico), Ana Roque de Duprey (Puerto Rico), Salomé Ureña de Henríquez (Dominican Republic), Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (Cuba), Juana Manuela Gorriti (Argentina), Carlos Varo (Spain-Puerto Rico), Mayra Montero (Cuba-Puerto Rico), Rosario Ferré (Puerto Rico) Marta Aponte Alsina (Puerto Rico), Mayra Santos (Puerto Rico).