Adriana Rodríguez-Pérsico

Adriana Rodríguez-Pérsico is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and, since 2005, an Independent Investigator for CONICET. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Salvador in 1975 and her Ph.D. from UBA in 1992. Her dissertation, entitled Un huracán llamado progreso. Utopía autobiografía en Sarmiento y Alberdi, was published by the Organization of American States in 1992.

She was an adjunct professor of literary theory during and shortly after her doctoral work (1990-93). During that time she also was invited to teach a course on politics, literature, and nationalism at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, and was a FAPESP research and teaching Fellow at the University of San Pablo, working on the same subjects.

Ms. Rodríguez-Pérsico then took up an appointment as a professor of Hispanic American literature at the University of São Paulo (1993-96). During her last year as a faculty member at USP, she held a postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Maryland’s Latin American Studies Center, where she conducted research and lectured on turn-of-the-century Latin American both there and at Yale University. Returning to Argentina, she gave up her position at USP to begin working for CONICET as an adjunct investigator (1998-2004) and, a year later, accepting her current post at UBA.

Over the years, Ms. Rodríguez-Pérsico has become an important voice in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American literary studies, examining how all elements of a given period’s culture, mores, and literature reflect and shape each other. She has participated in a number of conferences at such venues as the Latin American Studies centers at Duke University and the University of Maryland, at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, at Princeton and Emory universities, the University of Paris, University of Leiden, and Birbeck College of the University of London. Among her most significant publications are Ricardo Piglia: una poética sin límites (Univ. of Pittsburgh, 2004), which she wrote with Jorge Fornet, and Relatos de época: una cartografía de América Latina (1880-1920) (Rosario: Ed. Beatriz Viterbo, 2008). During her Guggenheim Fellowship term, she will be researching how science and technology affected the dissemination of knowledge in Argentine culture (1925-1950).