Profile

Rodney Lebrón Rivera is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. He holds a BA and MA in Latin American and Caribbean History from Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. After graduating, he taught courses on History of Puerto Rico, Historiography of Puerto Rico and Introduction to Literature, Latin American Art, and Culture at the University of Puerto Rico’s Humacao campus.

His research interests are focused on the relationship between written culture and literature (particularly private diaries) for Latin American in XIX and XX Century. His dissertation, entitled “Escritura privada y subjetividad pública en América Latina: Del diario político al diario de autor. Siglos XIX y XX,” analyzes private diaries belonging to different Latin American authors with the intention of offering a history of a textual artifact that is located on the margins of Latin American cultural history. His work, based on the crossing between literary criticism and sociocultural history, sits at the intersections of the region’s broader historiographies while it also explores the relation between literature and other disciplines like philosophy and anthropology.

In 2022, Rodney was awarded the Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones Teaching Award and in 2023, a Grant by the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning at Princeton University to develop a digital pedagogy project entitled Puerto Rico storymaps. In the fall of 2022 and in collaboration with graduate students Andy Alfonso and Ashford King, Rodney organized the Caribbean Studies Speakers Series: “Sound, Archive, and Literature” at Princeton University. He has also collaborated with academic and non-academic publications like Centro Journal of the Center for Puertorican Studies (CUNY), Ámbito de Encuentros. Revista de la Universidad Ana G. Méndez, Revista 80grados, among others.