Roberto González Echevarría

Cuban-American researcher of Latin American culture and literature. He is a professor at Yale University and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 2013 Prize of Criticism awarded by Instituto Cubano del Libro attached to Cuba's Ministry of Culture, for his work Lecturas y relecturas. Estudios sobre literatura y cultura.

He was born in Sagua la Grande, province of Villa Clara. Roberto's mother, Dr. Zenaida Echevarría, was a philosophy professor at the Institute of Sagua. For whatever reasons, Roberto González Echevarría left his native city heading to the United States, apparently while still a teenager. In that country he completed his education, earned his doctorate and made his life, accumulating much merit.

His book Myth and Archive won the 1989-90 Katherine Singer Kovacs award from the MLA and the Bryce Wood Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association in 1992.

Additionally, his book The Pride of Havana received the Dave Moore Award as the Best Baseball Book of 2002. His book Love and the Law in Cervantes (2005) had its origins in lectures he gave at Yale during 2002.

Books
Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (1977, 1990)
The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature (1985)
Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (1990, 1998)
Celestina's Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literatures (1993)
The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball (1999)
Crítica práctica, práctica crítica (2002)
Editor, The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories (1997)
Editor, Don Quixote: A Case Book (Oxford, 2005)
Editor, Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana (Cambridge University) (Gredos, 2006)
Co-editor, The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature (1996)
Co-editor, Cuba: un siglo de literatura (1902-2002) (2004)

Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature, Yale University. Ph.D. in Romance Languages from Yale in 1970, he has received honorary doctorates from Colgate University in 1987, the University of South Florida in 2000, and Columbia University in 2002.

In 1999 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In November 2002 the University of Puerto Rico, Arecibo, held a symposium in his honor. In 2004 the magazine Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana (Madrid), No. 33 (2004), paid him tribute.

He was a professor at Yale from 1970 to 1971 and at Cornell from 1971 to 1977, where he was among the founders of Diacritics, a journal dedicated to critical theory. Since 1977 he has been back at Yale, where he holds the Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature chair. The Sterling chairs are the most prestigious at Yale, having been held in the past in literature by René Wellek, Erich Auerbach and Paul de Man, and currently by Harold Bloom.

He teaches courses in Hispanic literatures on both sides of the Atlantic (Rojas, Cervantes, Lope, Calderón; Carpentier, Borges, Neruda). He has been chair of Yale's Department of Spanish and Portuguese for sixteen years and has also directed the Latin American Studies Program. He has given lectures in the United States, Canada, Latin America and Europe, and was the first Hispanist to direct a seminar at the School for Criticism and Theory.

In 2001 he gave lectures at Oxford, Cambridge, Berlin, and UCLA; in 2004 in Salamanca, Rome; in 2006 in Santiago, Chile, and at Colegio de México, and since then in Madrid, Berlin, Paris, New York, etc. In 2002 he delivered the DeVane Lectures, Yale's most prestigious public lecture series, on the subject of love and law in Cervantes.

In 2003 he gave a series of seminars at Columbia University on chronicles of discovery and conquest. In 2004 he delivered the Cervantes Lecture at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association of America.

A speaker of Spanish, English, French and Italian, he studies literatures in those languages, but his specialty is Spanish literature of the Golden Age and colonial and modern Latin American literature. Active in matters of theory, he has been or is a member of the editorial board of journals such as The Yale Journal of Criticism and The Yale Review.

He is currently or has been a member of Hispanic Review, Hispania, Revista Iberoamericana, and other North American, Latin American and European journals. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others.

His book Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Cambridge, 1990) received awards from the Modern Language Association of America and the Latin American Studies Association. His CD Rom Miguel de Cervantes was honored by Choice magazine; The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball (Oxford, 1999) won the first Dave Moore Award (Most Important Book on Baseball, 2000).

Other books: Relecturas (1976), Calderón and la crítica (1976), Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (1977), Isla a su vuelo fugitiva: ensayos críticos sobre literatura hispanoamericana (1983), The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature (1985), La ruta de Severo Sarduy (1986) and Celestina's Brood (1993). Co-coordinator of the Cambridge History of Latin American Literature (1996) and editor of the Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories (1997).

In 1999 Almar (Salamanca) published En un lugar de La Mancha: estudios cervantinos en honor de Manuel Durán, co-coordinated with Georgina Dopico-Black. Fondo de Cultura Económica of Mexico released a translation of Myth and Archive (Mito y archivo), Colibrí of Madrid of Celestina's Brood (La prole de Celestina), and Verbum of The Voice of the Masters (La voz de los maestros). In 2002 Fondo de Cultura published Crítica práctica/Práctica, a collection of essays on Latin American literature. He has published with Cátedra, of Madrid, critical editions of Los pasos perdidos, by Alejo Carpentier, and De donde son los cantantes, by Severo Sarduy. In 2005 Yale Press published Love and the Law in Cervantes (which Gredos published in 2008) and Oxford Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote: A Casebook.

Author of hundreds of articles and reviews in specialized North American, Latin American and European journals, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Review of Books and other periodicals such as The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, The Nation and USA Today. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Polish and Persian.

In March 2011 President Barack Obama personally presented it to him and nine other scholars in the East Room of the White House, in a ceremony in which he also presented the National Medal of the Arts to celebrities such as Quincy Jones and James Taylor.