Rodriguez Navas, Ana

Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture

Hispanic Studies Graduate Program Director

Education

Ph.D. Princeton University (Comparative Literature)
M.A. Université de Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle (Anglophone Literature and Culture)
M.A. Université de Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle (Comparative Literature)

Research Interests

My research explores 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st century literature and cinema, with a focus on Latin America, the transnational Caribbean, and their global diasporas.

My latest book is Tides of Progress: Anglo-Hispanic Print Culture, 1890-1940, co-edited with Peter Hulme (Bloomsbury Academic, Literary Studies Series, 2025). Tides of Progress is the first study of Anglo-Hispanic connections, interactions, and mutual appraisals during a critical period in which print culture evolved from the province of the lettered few into a mass-media phenomenon. It surfaces a wide range of previously unexplored archival materials to shed new light on global modernities.

My first book, Idle Talk, Deadly Talk: The Uses of Gossip in Caribbean Literature (University of Virginia Press, New World Studies, 2018), explores gossip’s place in Hispanic, Francophone, and Anglophone Caribbean writing. Gossip, I argue, can strengthen social ties, but also functions as an urgent, utilitarian, and deeply political practice — a means of staging the tensions and waging the narrative battles that mark Caribbean culture.

In 2020 I co-edited “The Legacy of Oscar Wilde in Latin American Literature and Culture” (with Nathalie Bouzaglo), a special issue of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies exploring Wilde’s previously unacknowledged place in Latin American culture and literature. I have published widely on writers including Jorge Luis Borges, Rosario Ferré, Guillermo Cabrera Infante (and his debt to Oscar Wilde), Alexander Pushkin and Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve; as well as on Latin American cinema, gossip and the Cuban canon, and other topics. My article “Words as Weapons: Gossip in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” published in MELUS in 2018, received LASA’s Haiti/Dominican Republic Section prize for best article, and in 2019 I received Loyola University Chicago’s Sujack Award for Faculty Research Excellence.

I was raised in Venezuela, Trinidad, and the United States. I hold a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University; two Masters degrees with Honors (in Anglophone Literature and Culture, and in Comparative Literature) from the Université de Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle; and an undergraduate degree from the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Venezuela. At Loyola, I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on Latin American and Caribbean literature and film, including Visions of Latin America; Latin American Women Filmmakers; Power and Writing in Latin America; and The Politics of Gossip in Caribbean Literature. I also direct the Hispanic Studies Graduate Program.

Specialty Area

Latin American Literature, Cinema, and Culture; Comparative Literature

Publications/Research Listings

Tides of Progress: Anglo-Hispanic Print Culture, 1890-1940 (co-edited with Peter Hulme), Bloomsbury Academic, Literary Studies Series (2025).

“Oscar Wilde’s Forgotten Legacy in Latin America.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 28:3 (2020), 321-328. Full co-edited volume, “The Legacy of Oscar Wilde in Latin American Literature and Culture”, available here.

“‘Free From the Fatal Contagion of Prudery’: Reading Wilde in Puerto Rico." Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 28:3 (2020), 395-426.

Idle Talk, Deadly Talk: The Uses of Gossip in Caribbean Literature. New World Studies Series, University of Virginia Press (2018). Available for free download here.

“Words as Weapons: Gossip in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 42.3 (2017): 55-83. Recipient of the 2018 Article Prize, awarded by the Haiti - Dominican Republic Section, Latin American Studies Association.