Professor
Academic Degrees
Antonio Barrenechea is a professor of Literature of the Americas and Cinema. His 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 (1851) as a gateway "Great American Novel" alongside encyclopedic works from the U.S., Mexico, and French Canada. He is coeditor of “Hemispheric Indigenous Studies,” a special issue of Comparative American Studies (2013) proposing an intertribal paradigm. Dr. Barrenechea has contributed writings to Comparative Literature, Revista Iberoamericana, Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada, American Literature, Leviathan, Telos, 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. He is currently writing “One Hemisphere, Many Nations,” a history of Literature of the Americas as an international field of study. It traces neglected scholarship from the Good Neighbor era, through the postwar rise of American Studies, and into the recent “hemispheric turn.” The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley has awarded him the 2022-23 Reese Fellowship to conduct archival research for this project. Following upon a 2016-2017 fellowship at the Institut Américain Universitaire in Aix-en-Provence, a second project, “The Groovy Gothic,” explores the intersection of the youth counterculture and 1960s-1970s horror cinema. Dr. Barrenechea is on the advisory boards of Comparative American Studies: An International Journal and Review of International American Studies. He currently serves as UMW faculty liaison for Special Collections at Simpson Library. Most recently, he was awarded a 2023-2024 M.C. Lang Fellowship in Book History, Bibliography, and Humanities Teaching with Historical Sources by Rare Book School at the University of Virginia.