Profile
Rodney Lebrón-Rivera finished her Ph.D. at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. Her main fields of study are modern and contemporary Latin-American literature in XIX and XX centuries. Her dissertation, "Escritura Privada y Subjetividad Pública en América Latina. Entre el diario politico y el diario de autor. 1895-2017" examines written culture, specifically private diaries, and explores the articulation of the authorial role in the Latin American cultural field, as well as the configuration of diary writing as a literary form in Cuba, México, and Argentina. Focusing on the diaries of José Martí, José Juan Tablada, Lorenzo García Vega, and Ricardo Piglia, this study combines hermeneutic and theoretical analyses, promoting new approaches to lesser-known works by recognized authors. This dissertation provides a cultural history of a textual artifact that lies on the margins of the Caribbean and Latin American cultural studies. The intention is to offer a history of how Caribbean and Latin American writers appropriate, following the historian Roger Chartier, the diary as a social practice with the purpose of constructing a "technology of the self" capable of articulating an author function in response to changes in both the public and private spheres, from the late 19th-century publishing market to the consolidation of the literate economic industry throughout the late 20th and the early 21st century.
At Princeton, Lebrón-Rivera was awarded the Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones Teaching Award and in 2023, a Grant by the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning 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 Puerto Rican Studies (CUNY), Ámbito de Encuentros. Revista de la Universidad Ana G. Méndez, Revista 80grados, among others.