Vicky Unruh

Vicky Unruh, Professor Emerita, received her B.A. and M.A.T. from Antioch College and her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Her teaching and research encompass the literary and intellectual culture of Spanish America from the late nineteenth century until the present, with particular attention to narrative, theatre, and performance; the interwar avant-gardes in Latin America; and Cuban literary and cultural production. Her books include Telling Ruins in Latin America (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009, co-edited with Michael J. Lazzara), Performing Women and Modern Literary Culture in Latin America (U of Texas Press, 2006); and Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encounters (U of California Press, 1994).  She coordinated a PMLA special issue on Work (October 2012) and, with Guillermina de Ferrari, a dossier of the journal A Contracorriente on Cuban writer Leonardo Padura (Fall 2015). She is currently completing a book on the critical recasting of the discourse of the Cuban Revolution in turn-of-the-millennium Cuban literature and film. Her chapters and articles have appeared in critical collections in the U.S. and abroad and in such journals as PMLA, Hispanic Review, Revista Iberoamericana, Latin American Research Review, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, and Cuadernos de Literatura among many others. She has received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) University Fellowship and research support from the Tinker and Danforth foundations, the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas, and the Center for Twentieth-Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In October 2015 she received the Premio Victora Urbano de Reconocimiento Académico from the Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispánica. In 2010-2011, she held the AMUW Women’s Chair in Humanistic Studies at Marquette University. At KU she has received the Chancellor’s Club Career Teaching Award, the Louise Byrd Graduate Educator Award, the Self-Fellowship Graduate Mentor Achievement Award, and the Center for Teaching Excellence Recognition for Graduate Teaching. She has served on the editorial boards of PMLA, Latin American Research Review, and Revista Iberoamericana. She currently serves on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (through 2018).