John Alba Cutler researches in the fields of Chicano/a/x and Latino/a/x literature and culture; his teaching comprises courses in these fields as well as in modern and contemporary American literature. His book Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature (Oxford, 2015) argues that Chicano/a/x literature provides a powerful counter-discourse to sociological accounts of assimilation in the post-WWII era. He is now working on a book tentatively titled “Latinx Modernism and the Spirit of Latinoamericanismo,” which examines the influence of Latin American modernismo on Spanish-language newspaper literature in the early twentieth century. The book shows how encounters with modernismo allowed Latino/a/x writers and readers to grapple with the conflicting legacies of Spanish and US coloniality. It also continues the first book’s investigation into literary institutions and in the generative (rather than merely representational) power of literary discourse. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming volume from Cambridge in the series Latinx Literature in Transition. Cutler has also published articles on Chicano/a/x and Latino/a/x literature and culture in such journals as American Literary History, English Language Notes, and Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and has contributed chapters to the Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement, and Culturas de la prensa en México. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Alice B. Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Before coming to Berkeley in 2021, Cutler spent more than a decade at Northwestern University, where he was recognized with a Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching Award in 2013.
Selected Publications
“Beyond Assimilation,” Race in American Literature and Culture, ed. John Ernest. Cambridge UP, 2022.
“Modernismo y campo literario de la prensa mexicoamericana,” Las culturas de la prensa en México, eds. Yanna Hadatty Mora and Viviane Mahieux. Mexico, D.F.: UNAM Ediciones Especiales, 2022.
“Latinx Historicisms in the Present.” American Literary History 34.1 (2022): 102-112.
“Latinx Modernism and the Spirit of Latinoamericanismo.” American Literary History 33.3 (2021): 571-587.
“Rubén Darío: Latino Poet,” English Language Notes 56.2 (2018): 71-89.
“At the Crossroads of Circulation and Translation: Rethinking US Latino/a Modernism,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus volume 3, cycle 3 (2018): https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0069
“Rosa Alcalá’s Aesthetics of Alienation,” in American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement, eds. Michael Dowdy and Claudia Rankine. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2018. 41-55.
“Borders and Borderlands Literature.” The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, ed. Yogita Goyal. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 157-73.
“The New Border.” College Literature 44.4 (2017): 498-504. Special issue edited by Russ Castronovo on Transnational Literature at a Moment of Nationalist Resurgence.
“Toward a Reading of Nineteenth-Century Latino Short Fiction,” The Latino 19th Century, eds. Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemán. New York: NYU Press, 2016. 124-145.
“Chicano Narrative’s Hidden Print Cultures,” Chicano Narrative Now, eds. Yolanda Padilla and William Orchard. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2016. 139-58.
“Quinto Sol, Chicano Literature, and the Long March Through Institutions.” American Literary History 26.1 (Summer 2014): 262-294.
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