Researching Spanish-Language Literature in Early US Latinx Newspapers
John Alba Cutler, Professor
English
Applications for Spring 2025 are closed for this project.
During the early twentieth century, Spanish-language newspapers played a critical role in publishing literary works in Latinx communities all over the United States. Hundreds of these newspapers have been digitized, with literally thousands of poems, short stories, chronicles, and serialized novels in them. But students and scholars have only just begun combing through these newspapers to discover what this immense literary archive can tell us about the evolution of Latinx literature and the experiences of Latinxs during this time period. I am creating a database of literary texts published in Spanish-language newspapers from 1915-1920. If you are interested in literature and have reading proficiency in Spanish, I hope you'll sign on to help with this project!
Role: Students will have two primary roles: (1) reading through digital scans of Spanish-language newspapers and logging literary texts and authors into a relational database; (2) discussing findings at semi-weekly meetings, including the ramifications of those findings for scholarly understanding of Latinx literature, American literature, and literary modernism.
Through these roles, students will acquire experience working in a relational database, reading and discussing poetry, short stories, and chronicles (a Latin American literary genre), and learning about different approaches to literary historical research.
Qualifications: Students must have reading proficiency in Spanish. Preference for literature majors, but that is not a requirement.
Hours: 3-5 hrs
Off-Campus Research Site: Work can be done remotely, but semi-weekly meetings will be in my campus office in Wheeler.
Arts & Humanities