Elisabeth L. Austin
· Associate Professor of FrenchVirginia Tech · Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures
Active 2005–2025
About
Elisabeth L. Austin is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Virginia Tech, within the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures. Her research focuses on reading cultures, gender, and science discourse in 19th-21st-century Spanish American narrative, poetry, and film. She is the author of 'Exemplary Ambivalence in Late Nineteenth-Century Spanish America' and has published articles in various academic journals such as Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, and Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos. Additionally, she co-authored a chapter on adaptations of Cecilia Valdés in 'The Scandal of Adaptation' and is co-editing a volume of essays titled 'Adaptation and the Edge Effects of Latin American Cultures.' Her current book project, tentatively titled 'The Material Turn: Science, Indigenismo, and the Rise of the Left in Peruvian Letters, 1887-1931,' examines the use of scientific discourse and material thinking in modern Peruvian literature, focusing on how authors employed science to advocate for Indigenous and women's rights and to support leftist political movements.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Law
- Art
- Humanities
- History
- Art history
- Sociology
- Literature
- Philosophy
- Linguistics
- Visual arts
- Ancient history
- Communication
- Mathematics
Selected publications
Introduction: Latin American Adaptations on the Edge
Palgrave studies in adaptation and visual culture · 2025-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingPalgrave studies in adaptation and visual culture · 2025-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingOn Incest and Adaptation: The Foundational Scandal of Cecilia Valdés
Palgrave studies in adaptation and visual culture · 2023-01-01 · 4 citations
book-chapter1st authorLusty Nationalism: Image and Affect in Alberto Arvelo’s Libertador (2013)
Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos · 2022
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Political Science
- Art
Director Alberto Arvelo’s 2013 biopic of Simón Bolívar, Libertador, recasts the general as physically handsome in order to use the actor Édgar Ramírez’s body to enhance the audience’s affective response toward his person, and, by extension, the Venezuelan nation. Curiously, this contemporary film portrayal of Bolívar evokes the use of portraiture during the Virreinato and Independence eras, which stoked nationalistic attachment by synecdoche through using portraits as stand-ins for national heroes such as Bolívar. Libertador thus invokes the past even as it invites spectators of the present to feel something new for its protagonist.
El General y "lo pequeño" de la historia: una lectura de los Bolívares de Ricardo Palma
Revista de estudios hispánicos · 2021
1st authorCorresponding- Humanities
- Humanities
- Art
"El General y 'lo pequeño' de la historia" analyzes several of Ricardo Palma's tradiciones that focus on Simón Bolívar. The tradiciones demystify not only General Bolívar, the independence-era hero whose life and times are chronicled throughout Venezuelan and Andean cultural mythologies, but, moreover, history itself, a discourse ascendant in power and prestige during the nineteenth century in Spanish America. Many of these tradiciones present a Peruvian critique of the Libertador, portraying him as an imperfect figure, both authoritarian and effeminate, characterizations that are quite distinct from those associated with the cult of Bolívar. These narratives underscore the artificial separation between history and fiction, while examining history as an ideological, nation-building discourse. Palma's Bolivarian tradiciones emphasize the subjective nature of history in order to cultivate critical counterpublics that might read against the grain, questioning both the general and "lo pequeño" of official histories and their fictions.
Badebec · 2020-09-30
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingJavier Uriarte. The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America. Nueva York/Londres: Routledge, 2020, 306 pp.
Latin American theatre review · 2020
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- History
- Art history
Reviewed by: Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina and Uruguay by William Garrett Acree Elisabeth L. Austin Acree, William Garrett, Jr. Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina and Uruguay. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2019. 279 pp. Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina and Uruguay presents a carefully researched history of Creole drama, from the late 19th century into the first decades of the 20th, throughout the River Plate region of Latin America. Acree's study offers an overview and analysis of a performance phenomenon that "effectively put the countryside onstage and represented the transformations the region's export boom and economic modernization were exacting not just on traditional ways of life but also on broader understandings of community" (3). This history of "popular culture on the move" (171) describes the musical presentation of dramas featuring gauchos and rural themes. These shows fostered the development of a theater-going entertainment culture in Argentina and Uruguay and left a legacy that has carried into radio shows, film, and television, among other forms of contemporary popular culture. Written in a clear and accessible style, Acree's study is divided into three parts: the history of drama and the emergence of Creole themes during the 17th-19th centuries; [End Page 152] the flourishing of Creole drama during the late 19th-early 20th centuries; and the legacy of Creole and nativist themes in Argentine and Uruguayan popular cultures. As the author describes in detail, Creole dramas grew out of the pomp and ceremony of Colonial viceregal and religious theater traditions and grew in popularity as inexpensive, popular entertainment that articulated social tensions around urbanization and immigration to Latin America during the late 19th century. Creole theater troupes often featured immigrants as the principal actors as well as the entrepreneurs who ran such groups, resulting in a curiously performative concept of lo criollo as a nostalgic and yet fairly inclusive evocation of Creole culture (85, 99). After the decline of Creole drama due to the increasing popularity of other forms of entertainment, the influence of its themes could be seen in Creole clubs where men "play gaucho" (109), some of which continue to exist to this day, as well as films, radio shows, and even a brand of mate that translates Creole themes into entertainment forms for the region's growing middle class. This study's archival depth highlights popular cultural phenomena that remain inaccessible to traditional literary studies, thus capturing the rise and continued influence of a genre that exists only partially in textual form. Within this expansive investigation, Acree might have further contrasted the late-century, gaucho-themed Creole dramas studied here with the canonical mid-century Romantic strains of the literatura gauchesca that was also popular in that region, as he does with the gauchesque drama at the beginning of the 19th century. Nonetheless, Staging Frontiers' greatest strength lies in the archival work that reveals the heterogeneity of cultural production and the regional nature of the Creole circuses and dramas that played to crowds numbering in the thousands, as acting troupes moved around the coastline of the Río de la Plata. Indeed, this volume's emphasis on a regional context and the mobility of cultural practices will inform future cultural studies in the field. Acree's work is a compelling portrait of the birth of modern popular culture in the Río de la Plata and an invaluable contribution to 19th and early 20th-century studies. Elisabeth L. Austin Virginia Tech Copyright © 2020 The Center of Latin American Studies
LaGreca, Nancy. Erotic Mysticism: Subversion and Transcendence in Latin American Modernista Prose
Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · 2018-01-01
article1st authorCorrespondingErotic Mysticism: Subversion and Transcendence in Latin American Modernista Prose
Letras Femeninas · 2018-11-01
article1st authorCorrespondingHispanófila/Hispanófila · 2018-01-01
article1st authorCorrespondingReviewed by: The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature between the Wars by Anke Birkenmaier Elisabeth L. Austin Birkenmaier, Anke. The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature between the Wars. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2016. 211 pp. ISBN: 978-08-1393-879-0. Anke Birkenmaier's The Specter of Races is a carefully-researched history of early twentieth century anthropologists who responded to the negative race discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by theorizing Latin American culture as independent from race, rejecting the scientific racism of nineteenth-century Positivism and early twentieth-century eugenicists. Birkenmaier's cultural history focuses principally on Fernando Ortiz (Cuba), Paul Rivet (France), Jacques Roumain (Haiti), and Gilberto Freyre (Brazil), centering each chapter on one main author, along with his networks of intellectual peers. While Birkenmaier's analyses confirm that not all of the figures she studies propose theories that are "antiracist" (17), her work convincingly shows how the diverse collection of social theorists she analyzes use science, literature, language, and art to ponder the relationship between culture and history separate from the elitist, race-based discourse of the past. One of the most important contributions of this volume is that it brings into dialogue anthropologists who worked separately, and yet occasionally in tandem, to define notions of culture in the process of which they "produced exceptional reflections on culture and cultural contact, language and race" (18). Comparing works from different cultural contexts that were originally written in several distinct languages, Birkenmaier synthesizes each author's work within a rich contextual frame. While race is not absent from the works she analyzes, Birkenmaier's clear prose explains the significance of these anthropologists' rejection of race as the foundation of culture, and how this opened a place for more inclusive conceptions of culture and its production. The book's title, The Specter of Races, comes from a term coined by Cuban historian and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz (33) to signal at once the unreal nature of race as a social convention not based in science, and its persistence as a "dangerous idea" (33). In Chapter 1, Birkenmaier describes Ortiz's separation of the ideas of culture and raza, which were used interchangeably in the early twentieth century, and details how the historian and social scientist opted to reject the idea of pure races. Instead, he used his interest in philology to develop sometimes-spurious arguments for Cuba's linguistic independence from Spain. While Ortiz does not successfully avoid all racist ideas (36), Birkenmaier concludes that Ortiz's focus on culture [End Page 183] and "transculturation," the imprinting of cultures on one another, shifted the study of culture in Cuba away from race and toward cultural production. Chapter 2 examines the writings of Paul Rivet, a French anthropologist who studied early American cultures before he was forced into exile during WWII. Rivet was exiled in Colombia and Mexico, and his student Alfred Métraux worked in Tucumán, Argentina, where he established an ethnology museum. Rivet, who believed that anthropology was deeply historical and that "cultures grew by way of diffusion and contact with other cultures" (52), claimed that his diffusionist approach allowed practitioners to better appreciate the contributions of indigenous cultures to contemporary society. Ultimately, his views were not influential to Mexican anthropology but his legacy resides in the museums he and his students established. Chapter 3 centers on Haitian writer and anthropologist Jacques Roumain and his activist writings, addressing also the cultural debates raised by others working in anthropology and literature at that time in Haiti, such as physician Jean Price-Mars and writer Normil Sylvain. Here Birkenmaier describes a sudden increase in interest in Haitian folklore as nationalism surged at the end of the U.S. occupation in 1934: folklore and folk traditions were seen as the possible foundations for culture, and were seen by some as subversive (81) after the occupation. Because folklore was claimed for nationalistic purposes, the cultural status of the Creole language and the vodou religion were debated, as both were valued as authentic expressions of culture but not considered to be refined. The last chapter, Chapter 4, traces the career of Brazilian anthropologist...
Frequent coauthors
- 1 shared
Elena Lahr-Vivaz
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Labs
Department of Modern and Classical Languages and LiteraturesPI
- Resume-aware match score
- Save to shortlist
- AI-drafted outreach
See your match with Elisabeth L. Austin
PhdFit ranks faculty by your research interests, methods, and publications — grounded in their actual work, not templates.
- Free to start
- No credit card
- 30-second signup