Ruth Hill
Dept. of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese
P.O. Box 400777
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4777
USA
tel: 434-924-7159
fax: 434-924-7160
email: rah8t@virginia.edu
Ruth Hill
Professor of Spanish
Affiliations: American Studies Program, English
Current Hispanic Baroque Research
Current Research Projects
Research Interests & Teaching
Recent Publications
Current Hispanic Baroque Research:
Prof. Ruth Hill is currently exploring the interface of science and hierarchy in the Spanish world during the baroque and late baroque periods. Though not instantly legible as such, alchemy, animal husbandry, herbal medicine, astrology, and physiognomy were interrelated, hegemonic discourses that could appear under their own names or under sundry rubrics: books of secrets, almanacs, books of problems or questions, encyclopedias, and so on. This variegated scientific literature enjoyed a robust circulation, but its importance to the development of the Spanish New World society of castes, including popular and learned notions of color and color differences, has not been adequately addressed. At the same time, she is examining the ways in which English-language critical race theory (CRT) might provide a conceptual and methodological framework for analyzing social hierarchy and conflict during this period. Such an examination should also reveal CRT's limitations and the modifications that we need to make when we approach identity issues during the Hispanic early modern with critical tools developed in modern and postmodern North American contexts.
Current Research Projects:
Critical Race Theory in Latin American [Con]Texts (book manuscript in-progress)
Aztecs, Incas, and Other White Men: A Hemispheric History of Hate (book manuscript in-progress)
Research Interests & Teaching:
Critical Race Studies; The Hispanic Transatlantic; Hemispheric Studies; Early Modern Science; Colonial and Nineteenth-Century Latin American Studies; Theories of Baroque and Neobaroque; Enlightenments and Modernities; Rhetoric and Poetics
Recent Publications:
Books
Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, Dec. 2005.
Sceptres and Sciences in the Spains: Four Humanists and the New Philosophy (ca. 1680-1740). Hispanic TRAC, vol. 17, administered by Bulletin of Spanish Studies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, Dec. 2000. North American distributor: University of Chicago Press.
Recent & Forthcoming Articles
"El drama de hacer patria. Negrofobia, judeofobia y modernidad criolla en Frutos de la educación (1830)" ["The Drama of Nation-Building: Negrophobia, Judeophobia, and Criollo Modernity in Frutos de la educación (1830)"]. Eds. David Mauricio Solodkow and Juan Vitulli. Poéticas de lo criollo: inestabilidad semántica y heterogeneidad identitaria. La transformación del concepto 'criollo' en las letras hispanoamericanas. Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo (forthcoming, 2008).
"Between Black and White: A Critical Race Theory Approach to Caste Poetry in the Spanish New World." Comparative Literature (forthcoming, 2008).
"Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the Pre-History of Race in Latin America: Reflections on Caste and Hegemony in Valle y Caviedes." Afro-Hispanic Review (forthcoming, 2008).
"Entre lo transatlántico y lo hemisférico: Los proyectos raciales de Andrés Bello" ["Between the Transatlantic and the Hemispheric: Andrés Bello's Racial Projects"]. Otros estudios transatlánticos: lecturas desde lo latinoamericano, special issue of Revista Iberoamericana. Eds. Nina Gerassi Navarro and Eyda Merediz (forthcoming, 2007).
"Hearing Las Casas Write: Rhetoric and the Facade of Orality in Brevísima relación." MLA Approaches to Teaching Bartolomé de las Casas. Eds. Santa Arias and Eyda Merediz (forthcoming, 2007).
"Teaching the Pre-History of Race Along the Hispanic Transatlantic." Dieciocho 30.1 (Spring 2007): 105-117.
"Conquista y modernidad, 1700-1766. Un enfoque transatlántico" ["Conquest and Modernity, 1700-1766: A Transatlantic Approach"]. Fénix de España. Modernidad y cultura propia en la España del siglo XVIII (1737-1766). Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2006. 57-71.
"Towards An Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Critical Race Theory." Literature Compass 3.2 (Spring 2006): 53-64.
"Casta as Culture and the Sociedad de Castas as Literature." Interpreting Colonialism. Eds. Byron Wells and Philip Stewart. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004. 231-259.
