Profile

Rubens Riol is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University, where he completed his M.A. in 2024. He holds a B.A. in Art History from the University of Havana, Cuba.

After completing his undergraduate degree, Rubens taught courses on the History of Art and Literature, Latin American Art, and Cuban Art, Culture, and Patrimony for six years at San Geronimo College. In 2014, he was selected to participate in the Talent Press at the Guadalajara International Film Festival and coordinated Proyecto Equilátero, a film club dedicated to cultural diversity. Currently, he teaches the undergraduate course Spanish Language and Culture through Cinema (SPA209) at Princeton.

Rubens' research interests include nudity as a cultural device, narratives of desire, and scatological aesthetics in the visual arts, cinema, and Latin American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His current research explores the intersections of crowd theory, body studies, and Cuban culture.

He is the author of “La caricia del látigo. Rufo Caballero, un ídolo imposible” (Ediciones ICAIC, 2016) and “El entierro de las consignas. Textos críticos sobre arte cubano” (Editorial Hypermedia, 2018). His work has been featured in the anthologies “50 años de cine cubano, 1959-2008” (Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2019) and “Lenguaje sucio. Narraciones críticas sobre el arte cubano” (Editorial Hypermedia, 2019). In recent years, Rubens has contributed as a columnist for El Nuevo Herald, Cine Cubano, and Hypermedia Magazine.