Eighteenth, Nineteenth & Twentieth-Century Spanish Literature, especially new approaches to genre studies (short story, novel, epistolarity, drama, travel writing); interdisciplinary studies; women´s writing. Interests: Fiction writing (short story).

Ana Rueda, born in Bilbao, Spain, earned her M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Florida and her Ph.D from Vanderbilt University. She came to the University of Kentucky in 2002 and is the Chair of the Department of Hispanic Studies for the term 2005-2009. She offers seminars at other institutions, such as Middlebury, Vermont, US, and Universidad de Cádiz, Spain, and delivers many lectures at national and international meetings. Ana Rueda serves on the editorial board for an international publishing house and as peer-reviewer for numerous journals. She currently directs or co-directs eight doctoral dissertations and serves in fifteen doctoral advisory committees in the department. Since March 2005 she is co-chair with Gail Hoyt of the F.L.I.E. program in Foreign Languages and Economics. She also serves in the College Promotion and Tenure Committee (2004-2007). Her professional memberships include: MLA, AIH, ASECS, IASECS, ASHAHS, AIG. She is President of the Ibero-American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (IASECS) for 2005-2006.

Current Work

Recent and upcoming seminars: The Age of Enlightenment, The Aesthetics of Drama in Contemporary Spain, Travel Writing in Hispanic Literature, 19th-Century Drama and the Romantic Subject, Epistolarity. Her work in progress includes Jovellanos’s diaries in light of theories of the sublime; issues related to the field of book history; nineteenth-century editorial and reading practices. Book in progress: Fictions of Conflict: Questioning Alterity in Spanish and Moroccan War Narrative. The book will help reconstruct a significant yet poorly studied portion of Spanish literary history, the fictional and non-fictional accounts of military conflicts between Spain and Morocco, beginning with colonial chronicles of the 1859-60 African War and ending with anti-war novels of the 1930s.

Awards and Grants

Ana Rueda has recently been nominated by the University of Kentucky for the 2006 NEH Summer Award for her book project Fictions of Conflict. Among other honors and grants, Ana Rueda received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 1997-1998 for her book Cartas sin lacrar. In 1993 she was honored with the Kemper Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Relatos desde el vacío. Un nuevo espacio crítico para el cuento actual (Orígenes, 1992) explores the short story in Spain from 1970 to 1985, particularly as influenced by Latin American masters of the genre. This book constructs a new theoretical model for the genre as it discusses short story collections by such Spanish authors as Javier del Amo, Rafael Dieste, Ricardo Doménech, José Ferrer-Bermejo, José Ángel Valente, Carmen Martín Gaite, and Enrique Vila-Matas, among others. (ISBN: 84 7825 061 1) La agenda negra (Endymion, 2001), a collection of short stories, is Ana Rueda's personal contribution to the genre. (ISBN: 84 7731 382 2)

Pigmalión y Galatea: Refracciones modernas de un mito (Fundamentos, 1998) provides an interdisciplinary and comparative study of how writers in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have refashioned this self-reflexive myth of the artist. The book begins with a preliminary discussion of Ovid's Metamorphoses, not only to establish historical and critical context, but also to stage an alternately complementary and conflicted dialogue between Ovid´s text and the aesthetic theories that the Pygmalion-Galathea myth has generated since the Romantic period. In keeping with the book´s comparative interest, Rueda analyzes such authors as Bécquer, Galdós, Gómez de la Serna, Alarcón, Torrado, Grau, Quiles, Resino, Arrabal, Vázquez Montalbán, and Isabel-Clara Simó in relation to those by such other European and American authors as Poe, Merimée, Hoffman, Hawthorne, Balzac, Pushkin, Shaw, Capec, Landolfi, Oates and Petry. (ISBN: 84 245 0784 3)

Cartas sin lacrar: La novela epistolar y la España Ilustrada, 1789-1840 (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2001) offers the first comprehensive study of a previously forgotten literary genre. It documents and analyzes more than forty novels of both the Enlightenment and the Romantic periods written in the form of letters that, despite their considerable popularity at the time, remain unknown even to specialists in the field. The book has become a standard reference in eighteenth-century studies. (ISBN: 84 848 9018 X)

Irene y Clara o la madre imperiosa (Universidad de Salamanca, 2003) is the first modern edition and study of an epistolary novel by Vicente Salvá. This critical edition locates the lost 1830 edition of the novel, compares it to subsequent editions available in Spain, and establishes the dual authorship of the text (Salvá collaborated with Gómez Hermosilla in the adaptation of a lost original). As the first in-depth study of this novel, it helps put into perspective Spain´s forgotten contribution to a genre (the epistolary novel) that reached its peak in 18th-century England, France, and Germany. This novel also establishes an important link between the Age of Enlightenment and the Romantic and Realist novelistic practices of the Modern Period. (ISBN: 84 891 0937 0)

Book Chapters & Articles

Ana Rueda has published eight essays in books on contemporary women writers (among them Mercè Rodoreda, Carmen Martín Gaite, Cristina Fernández Cubas, and Care Santos) and has one more forthcoming (Bucknell UP). In addition to her book of short stories, La agenda negra, she has published short stories in refereed journals and book collections. Her articles, published in venues such as Insula, Dieciocho, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, reflect research interests that span various periods, genres and critical traditions, for instance: early 19th-century shipwreck narratives; epistolary practices in Galdós and Unamuno; links between music or the plastic arts and modern/contemporary texts; intellectual history of the Enlightenment; feminist issues and the experience of women writers.