Profile

Ashford King is a PhD candidate in Princeton’s Spanish and Portuguese Department. He holds an AB in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University and an MA in Spanish and Portuguese from Princeton. He researches the literatures and cultural traditions of the Caribbean, the Americas, and the Atlantic world. His dissertation project, “‘Good Migrants’: Canary Islander Cultural Production in Louisiana and Cuba, 1763-1868,” analyzes the literary and cultural production of the Gulf of Mexico region as reflective of a particular vision of Canarians (isleños) as “good migrants,” and as a human resource that imperial Spain could draw upon to combat three main threats to Spanish hegemony in the Americas, perceived in ethnic terms: Africanization, Gallicization, and Anglicization. This dissertation makes an anti-racist intervention in cultural studies of the Americas, and aims to counter the xenophobic rhetoric of the present moment by underscoring that which groups are deemed “illegal” or “undesirable” in a given historical moment corresponds to who holds the keys to empire. He applies research methodologies from literary and cultural studies, history (including oral history), and cultural geography, and he works with sources in Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and Haitian Kreyòl. He is also proud to serve on the board of the New Orleans-based Institute for Public Ethnomusicology. Born and raised in Kentucky, he now resides in Cinnaminson, New Jersey