Professor
Academic Degrees
Antonio Barrenechea is a professor of Literature of the Americas and Cinema. His first book America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies (University of New Mexico Press, 2016) merges comparative literature and hemispheric studies by reinterpreting Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick as a gateway to maximalist novels from the post-WWII United States, Mexico, and Quebec. His second book, Studies in Groovy Gothic Cinema: Horror, Trash, and the Hemispheric Sixties (Bloomsbury, 2026) explores the relation between monster movies and the "long" counterculture within six filmmaking capitals of the Western Hemisphere. This second project was partly funded by a fellowship at the Institut Américain Universitaire in Aix-en-Provence, France in 2016-2017.
Dr. Barrenechea is coeditor of “Hemispheric Indigenous Studies,” a special issue of Comparative American Studies (2013) proposing an intertribal paradigm. He has published work in Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Revista Iberoamericana, Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada, American Literature, Leviathan, Telos, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, the ACLA “state-of-the-discipline” report, and other venues. “Hemispheric Studies Beyond Suspicion” won the 2014-2016 prize for best essay from the International Association of Inter-American Studies. It is the basis for his latest book project.
Currently, he is writing “One Hemisphere, Many Nations: A Historiography of Literature of the Americas.” The manuscript traces neglected scholarship from the Good Neighbor era, through the postwar rise of American Studies, and into the 2000s “hemispheric turn.” The Bancroft Library awarded him the 2022-23 Reese Fellowship to conduct archival research toward its completion. An M.C. Lang Fellowship from Rare Book School followed in 2023-2024.
Dr. Barrenechea is on the advisory boards of Comparative American Studies (CAS) and Review of International American Studies(RIAS). He formerly served on the boards of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) and the International Association of Inter-American Studies (IAS).