Profile

Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones (Ph.D., Universidad Central de Madrid), taught at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras (1970-1982) before joining the Princeton University faculty in 1983. He currently holds the Emory L. Ford Chair of Spanish. He also served as director of the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton for six years. Professor Díaz-Quiñones teaches Spanish-American literature, with special emphasis on 19th and 20th century intellectual and cultural history, including fiction, essay and poetry. He has taught seminars on individual authors such as Martí, Palés Matos, Fernando Ortiz, and Ricardo Piglia, as well as on "Empire and its cultural and literary implications in the Spanish-Caribbean," and on "Literature and Memory."  

Professor Díaz-Quiñones has devoted many articles to the role of poets and intellectuals in Hispanic-Caribbean society, among others Luis Palés Matos, Antonio S. Pedreira, and Pedro Henríquez Ureña. He has edited works by Tomás Blanco, Cintio Vitier, and José Luis González. His publications include El almuerzo en la hierba (1982); an edition of El prejuicio racial en Puerto Rico, by Tomás Blanco (1985); an edition of works by Luis Lloréns Torres, Verso y prosa (1986); a study on the Cuban poet Cintio Vitier: La memoria integradora (1987); and a book of essays on Puerto Rican culture, La memoria rota: ensayos de cultura y política (1993). He has also edited the volume El Caribe entre imperios (1997), and wrote an introduction to the Alfaguara edition of Cuentos completos by José Luis González (1997). A book of essays, El arte de bregar, was published in 2000, as well as the Cátedra edition of La guaracha del Macho Camacho by Luis Rafael Sánchez. His book Sobre los principios: los intelectuales caribeños y la tradición was published in Argentina in 2006.

Professor Díaz-Quiñones has taught as visiting professor at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras; the University of Pennsylvania; Rutgers University; the University of Washington, Seattle; the Universidad de Buenos Aires; the Universidad de Cartagena, Colombia; and Swarthmore College. He also taught at Hostos Community College (CUNY) in the South Bronx.

An anthology of his essays, edited and translated into Portuguese by Pedro Meira Monteiro, titled A memória rota, was published in Brazil in 2016. In 2019 he published a volume titled Once tesis sobre un crimen de 1899.

Articles and essays by Díaz-Quiñones, as well as video and audio recordings of scholarly interest, can be found on his website.