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) alongside encyclopedic novels from the U.S., Mexico, and French Canada. He is also coeditor of “Hemispheric Indigenous Studies,” a special issue of Comparative American Studies (2013) proposing an intertribal paradigm. Dr. Barrenechea has contributed articles and reviews to Comparative Literature, Revista Iberoamericana, Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada, American Literature, Leviathan, 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. Dr. Barrenechea is currently researching a new project, “One Hemisphere, Many Nations,” an intellectual history of Literature of the Americas that recovers international pioneers from the “Good Neighbor” era, through the postwar rise of American Studies, and into the recent “hemispheric turn.” 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 presently a board member of the International American Studies Association, the International Association of Inter-American Studies, and the journal Comparative American Studies.