A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea received a Dorothy Foehr Huck Research Award from Penn State University Libraries for the project “Luis Alberto Sánchez and the Literary Historiography of the Americas.” The project forms part of a book-in-progress “One Hemisphere, Many Nations: A Historiography of Literature of the Americas,” a first disciplinary history of its kind.
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea will publish a new book this year on Latin American gothic cinema with Bloomsbury Publishing. The book can be pre-ordered and will be available January 8, 2026.
In the book, Studies in Groovy Gothic Cinema, Barrenechea launches an inquiry into inter-American exploitation cinema-a horror cinema which captured the rise of ’60s counterculture and youth-oriented lifestyles-as it harnessed the cultural zeitgeist through gratuitous depictions of sex, blood, and music.
Despite the genre’s cultural impact, Barrenechea argues, its association with vulgar taste, shoestring budgets, and cheap thrills makes it often overlooked in existing cinema history and scholarship. This book places film studies and comparative American studies into a new conversation involving exploitation cinema, targeting an American hemispheric tradition and considering how art and trash intersect in undisciplined ways.
Barrenechea examines low-budget cinema produced in filmmaking capitals of the Western Hemisphere, including Mexican monster films, Brazilian psychedelia, Argentine sci-fi, Canadian splatter, and Hollywood grindhouse, ultimately yielding a new cinema history that is both messier and more inclusive.
Learn more about or order Barrenechea’s book Studies in Groovy Gothic Cinema.
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
During the spring 2023 semester, Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea served as faculty liaison to Special Collections in Simpson Library. One of his accomplishments came via collaboration with Nick Onorato, a former student and communication major. A “spotlight” series on rare books highlighted UMW’s collection from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Watch the series on YouTube.
Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, was recently awarded the 2022-2023 Reese Fellowship in American Bibliography and History of the Book in the Americas, from the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. His project “One Hemisphere Many Nations: Boltonian Americanism and Literary Historiography” will explore the Herbert Bolton archive in relation to the emergence of literary pan-Americanism in the lead-up to World War II. The full project will entail working with rare, untranslated, and out-of-print scholarly books forming the early Literature of the Americas academic field.
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
On April 11, 2022, Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, was an invited speaker at the University of Glasgow symposium “Fictional Maximalism and the Americas: New Voices, New Perspectives.” His presentation, “Literature of the Americas as Maximalist Discipline” discussed scholarly and historiographical encyclopedism in hemispheric American literary studies.
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently published “Literature of the Americas” in The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 1980-2020. Ed. Leslie Larkin, Stephen Burn, and Patrick O’Donnell. London and New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2022: 835-44.
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently published “Fear and Loathing in São Paulo: Slum Metaphysics in the ‘Coffin Joe’ Triptych (1964-2008)” in a special issue of Telos on “The Modern City in World Cinema.”
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently published “A Hemispheric World of Differences: Literature of the Americas, 1982-2000,” the lead essay in the collection Essays in Honor of Lois Parkinson Zamora: From the Americas to the World, edited by Monika Kaup and John Ochoa and issued from Lexington Books.
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently published “The Jungle and the Whale: Vortices of Nation in Moby-Dick and La vorágine” in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, the flagship Melville journal.
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently presented the paper “A Hemispheric World of Differences: Luis Alberto Sánchez and Stanley T. Williams” at the meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, which took place virtually this year.