Roberto Marquez

Curriculum Vitae

Personal Homepage

Courses

Roberto Marquez

William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Translator, editor, essayist, literary critic, and cultural historian Roberto Márquez is a William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Mount Holyoke College. He came to Mount Holyoke from George Mason University where, from 1986 to 1989, he held the Clarence J. Robinson Professorship. Between 1970 and 1986, he taught at Hampshire College, where he initiated and developed the College’s Caribbean Studies Program and was named first incumbent to the Harold F. Johnson Professiorial Chair.

Puerto Rican born and raised in Spanish Harlem, he has traveled, lived, studied, and worked in various parts of Spain, South America, and the Caribbean, including Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, Cuba, and Nicaragua.

He received his B.A. from Brandeis University in 1966 and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship Award for study in Peru (1966), he has also received National Endowment for the Humanitites (1978-79) and Tinker Foundations (1980-81) Postdoctoral Fellowships, a Coordinating Council on Literary Magazines (CCLM) Editor’s Fellowship Award for his work as founder-editor of Caliban: A Journal of New World Thought and Writing, and the Dorothy Blumendeld Moyer Prize "for creative work in Languages and Literature" (1966).

Márquez has served on the Board of Advisory Editors of The American Quarterly, the Advisory Board of The Curbstone Press, the Board of Directors of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) [1981-91], and on the Editorial Board of NACLA’S Report on The Americas (1991-96). Márquez has also served as a member of the Advisory Committee of the Clarence L. Holte Literary Prize, on the International Jury for the Premio Casa de Las Americas, as a member of the Editorial Board of the Massachusetts Review, and as area coordinator of the Migrant Education Program of Middlesex County, Massachusetts. A member of the Board of Trustees of Hampshire College from 1988-96, and now Trustee Emeritus, from 1993 to 1995 he was also on the Board of Girls Club, Inc. in Holyoke, Mass. He currently sits on the Board of Directors of The Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and is an associate editor of the New World Studies Series published by the University of Virginia Press.

Recognized for the caliber of his many translations from the work of a wide variety of Latin American poets and writers, and his work in the field of Caribbean literary and cultural history, Márquez is the editor of two volumes of the poetry of Nicolás Guillén, Patria o Muerte: The Great Zoo and Other Poems and, with D.A. McMurray, Man-Making Words: Selected Poems. He is also editor of the bilingual anthology Latin American Revolutionary Poetry. His essays, reviews, and commentaries have appeared in a variety of publications both here and abroad, including Sin Nombre (Puerto Rico), Casa de Las Americas (Havana), Escritura (Venezula), Jamaica Journal (Kingstown), West Indian Guide (Baltimore & The Hague), Anales del Caribe (Havana), Ideologies and Literature, Latin American Research Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice Literary Supplement, and The Latino Review of Books.