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Dean's Office
|  | Rodrigo Lazo, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Study
(949) 824-6719
Email: rlazo@uci.edu
My research explores contexts that complicate the traditional division between American Studies (nation) and Latin American Studies (region). This approach, best described as Hemispheric American Studies, is highly interdisciplinary and multilingual. In keeping with this goal of seeking the intricate connections between people and places in the hemisphere, my current book project is a study of Spanish-language materials published in Philadelphia and New York from the 1790s to the 1830s. This is a literary and intellectual history that recovers the conditions under which men of letters from different parts of the hemisphere interacted to create a variety of books and periodicals. Tentatively titled, “Constituting the Americas: Filadelfia and Spanish-Language Print Culture in the United States, 1794-1833,” this book examines how the spatial and racial influences on nation-formation overlapped with the belief in the Americas as a distinct area from Europe. While my work is informed and in dialogue with Latino Studies, I seek to emphasize a radical difference between today's commercialized ethnic identities and the social and economic conditions that led to print culture production in the past. Similar preoccupations inspired my first book, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States, a study of newspapers, pamphlets, and books published by Cuban exiles in the antebellum New York. Deploying a critical framework that considered both Cuban cultural influences and the US political arena, Writing to Cuba showed how writers produced writing that circulated transnationally from the United States to Cuba and back.
While I am primarily a scholar of nineteenth-century writing, I also teach and periodically write about contemporary Latino literature and immigration narratives. My recent courses include “Imagining the Americas," “Latino Literature and the Archive,” and “Immigrant Fictions.” I am on the steering committee of UC-Cuba, an initiative to promote research about the island. In addition, I am currently working with faculty in numerous departments to develop a multilingual master’s/Ph.D. program on The Americas.
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