Faculty Directory
Dr. Ana B. Rodríguez Navas
Title/s: Hispanic Studies Graduate Program Director Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture
Specialty Area: Latin American Literature & Culture
Office #: Crown Center 468
Phone: 773.508.2171
Email: arodrigueznavas@luc.edu
Research Interests
My research explores 20th and 21st century literature and cinema, with a focus on Latin America, the transnational Caribbean, and their global diasporas.
My first book, Idle Talk, Deadly Talk: The Uses of Gossip in Caribbean Literature (New World Studies, University of Virginia Press), examines gossip’s place in Hispanic, Francophone, and Anglophone Caribbean writing. Gossip, I argue, can strengthen social ties, but can also function as an urgent, utilitarian, and deeply political practice — a means of staging the tensions and waging the narrative battles that mark Caribbean culture.
In 2020, I co-edited “The Legacy of Oscar Wilde in Latin American Literature and Culture,” a special issue of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies exploring Wilde’s previously unacknowledged place in Latin American culture and literature. My article “Word as Weapons: Gossip in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” published in MELUS in 2018, received LASA's Haiti/Dominican Republic Section prize for best article, and in 2019 I received Loyola University Chicago’s Sujack Award for Faculty Research Excellence.
I was raised in Venezuela, Trinidad, and the United States. I hold a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, and two Masters degrees with Honors in Anglophone Literature and Culture and in Comparative Literature from the Université de Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle. I served as elected member of the Executive Committee of the Latin American Studies Association’s Venezuelan Studies Section (2016-2018) and as Chair of the Midwest MLA’s Comparative Literature Section (2015-2019).
At Loyola, I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on contemporary Caribbean and Latin American literature and cinema including Spies, Sleuths, and Snitches in Latin American Literature and Cinema; Latin American Women Filmmakers; Power and Writing in Latin America; and The Politics of Gossip in Caribbean Literature. I also direct the Hispanic Studies Graduate Program.
Selected Publications
Book:
Idle Talk, Deadly Talk: The Uses of Gossip in Caribbean Literature. New World Studies Series, University of Virginia Press (2018). Available for free download here.
Other Publications:
