English and Comparative Literature Expert - Ramón Saldívar

Share this

Back to Faculty by Subject List

Ramón Saldívar
Hoagland Family Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity

Biography

Ramón Saldivar's teaching and research focus on the areas of literary criticism and literary theory, the history of the novel, cultural studies, modernism, globalization and issues concerning transnationalism, post-colonial literature, and Chicano and Chicana studies. He is also interested in the history of the novel and nineteenth--and early twentieth-century British and American comparative studies.

Saldívar has served on the editorial boards of Stanford University Press and the scholarly journals, American Literature, Aztlán, and Modern Fiction Studies. His articles have appeared in a range of major journals such as these, and his publications reflect the variety of these interests.  He is the author of three books, including Figural Language in the Novel: The Flowers of Speech from Cervantes to Joyce (1984), a study of the authority of meaning in selected canonical European and American novels; Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990), a history of the development of Chicano narrative forms; and his most recent book, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (2006), a study of the modern American borderlands, transnationalism and globalism and their role in creating and delimiting agents of history.

Saldívar has also served on the Board of Governors of the University of California Humanities Research Institute and on the national council of the American Studies Association. Fellowships that he has received include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a National Council on Chicanos in Higher Education grant, a Danforth Doctoral Fellowship, and a Dallas TACA Centennial Teaching Fellowship.  In 2003, he received the WLA’s Distinguished Achievement Award for Literary Criticism, and in 2006, he was one of two recipients of the MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies for his work in The Borderlands of Culture.  

At Stanford, he acted as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences from 1994-1999.  He has also received Irvine and Bing curriculum development grants, is the 1994 recipient of the Lillian and Thomas B. Rhodes Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at Stanford, and the 1998 recipient of the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contributions to Undergraduate Education. He is the current of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford.

 

Key Works

  • The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary. Duke University Press, 2006.
  • Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. 
  • Figural Language in the Novel: The Flowers of Speech from Cervantes to Joyce.  Princeton University Press, 1984.

 

Prof. Saldívar in the News