Professor Ryan Long is the Clara and Robert Vambery Distinguished Professor of Comparative Studies for 2016-17. After receiving his PhD from Duke University in 2002, Ryan Long taught Spanish at the University of Oklahoma for 11 years. His publications include work on the EZLN [Zapatista Army of National Liberation], Mexican cinema, prison literature, and writers such as Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, María Luisa Mendoza, José Gorostiza, Juan Villoro, Laura Esquivel, and Roberto Bolaño. His book, Fictions of Totality: The Mexican Novel, 1968, and the National-Popular State, was published in 2008 by Purdue University Press. In addition to shorter pieces about Cristina Rivera Garza and Bruno Montané, he is currently working on two book projects, one about Bolaño and another about the Swiss architect and one-time Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer, who lived and worked in Mexico from 1939 to 1949. With guidance from the staff at MITH and under the auspices of the Vambery professorship, Dr. Long is currently developing an interactive platform that provides simultaneous and layered presentations of Meyer’s work and its historical context.
You can read more of Dr. Long’s publications on the World Literature Today website.
Below is a video of Long discussing his research work at University of Maryland on March 29, 2017:
Ryan Long Vambery Lecture: 'Hannes Meyer in Europe and Mexico: Building, a Poetics of Displacement’ from MITH in MD on Vimeo.
