Profile
Rubén Gallo is the Walter S Carpenter Jr. Professor in Latin American Literature at Princeton University, where he has taught since 2002. He is affiliated with the School of Architecture, the Program in European Cultural Studies, and with the Department of Comparative Literature.
His current research focuses on the intersection between modern architecture, literature, and film in Cuba and Latin America. He is the editor of Havana Modern: Critical Readings in Cuban Architecture (Arquine, 2023), a volume offering theoretical readings of modern architecture in Havana, Cuba. Cuban Modernity, a forthcoming book, examines how writers from Alejo Carpentier to Guillermo Cabrera Infante read and inhabited modern built environments in 1950s Havana, and also discusses how foreign intellectuals, including Graham Greene and Jean-Paul Sartre, responded to Cuba’s specific version of modernism.
He has published extensively on the intersection between European and Latin American modernisms: Mexican Modernity: the Avant-Garde and the Cultural Revolution (MIT Press, 2006, winner of the MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize), explores the relation between Mexican avant-gardes and their European counterparts; Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (MIT, 2010, winner of the Gradiva Prize), discusses how Mexical intellecutals from Paz to Kahlo read Freud in the post-Revolutionary period; Proust’s Latin Americans (Hopkins, 2014), analyzes Marcel Proust’s vision of Latin America in his life and work
Rubén Gallo is also a novelist and has published two books on Cuba: Teoría y práctica de la Habana (2017) and Muerte en La Habana (2021).
His work has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Chinese. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves on the board of the Freud Museum, Vienna.
Gallo’s graduate teaching focuses on the intersection between modern architecture and literature in Latin America.
Recent undergraduate courses include: “Opera and Politics,” “Proust, Freud, Borges,” and “Literature and Politics in Latin America.”
Education
- Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University
- B.A. in English from Yale University
Selected Publications
Books in English
- Havana Modern: Critical Readings in Cuban Architecture, ed. Rubén Gallo. Mexico City: Arquine, 2023.
- Conversation at Princeton (with Mario Vargas Llosa). Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2023.
- New Tendencies in Mexican Art: the 1990s (Palgrave, 2004)
- Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (MIT, 2004)
- The Mexico City Reader (Wisconsin, 2004)
- Freud’s Mexico: into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (MIT, 2010)
- Proust’s Latin Americans (Hopkins 2014)
- Havana Modern: Critical Readings on Cuban Architecture (Arquine, 2023)
- Conversation at Princeton with Mario Vargas Llosa (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)
Books in Spanish
- Heterodoxos mexicanos: una antología dialogada (with Ignacio Padilla, FCE, 2006)
- México DF: Lecturas para paseantes (Turner, 2005)
- Las artes de la ciudad (FCE, 2010)
- Máquinas de vanguardia (Sexto Piso, 2014)
- Freud en México (FCE, 2013)
- Los latinoamericanos de Proust (Sexto Piso, 2016)
- Teoría y práctica de La Habana (JUS, 2017)
- Conversación en Princeton con Mario Vargas Llosa (Alfaguara, 2017)
- Crónicas de una pequeña ciudad mexicana en La Habana (Hypermedia, 2020)
- Muerte en La Habana (Vanilla Planifolia, 2021)
Books in French
- Mexico: Chroniques littéraires d’une mégalopole baroque (Autrement, 2007)
- Freud au Mexique (Éditions Campagne Première, 2013)
- Proust Latino (Buchet Chastel, 2019)
Book in Italian
- Morte all’Avana. Milano: Ventanas, 2023.
- Un Edipo Stalinista (Il Saggiatore, 2013)