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.”