The Center for the Americas

Meet the Director

Vera M. Kutzinski joined the Vanderbilt University in 2004 as the Center’s first director and the first Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of English. She is also a Professor of Comparative Literature. Before joining the faculty, Kutzinski was Professor of English, African-American Studies, and American Studies at Yale University.

Kutzinski is a literary scholar and cultural historian whose research has focused on the U.S., the Caribbean, and Latin America during the 19th and 20th centuries. Along with scores of articles, Kutzinski has authored three books in her field: two critical studies, Against the American Grain: Myth and History in Williams Carlos Williams, Jay Wright, and Nicol�s Guill�n (1987), and Sugar’s Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (1993), and a translation of Nicol�s Guill�n’s long poem The Daily Daily (1989). Currently, she is preparing a book-length manuscript about Langston Hughes in the Americas.

In addition to her many scholarly endeavors, Kutzinski contributed significantly to curricular and administrative innovation during her eighteen years on the Yale faculty. She was an architect of African-American Studies’ interdisciplinary Ph.D. program; she served as chairwoman of a university-wide committee charged to reform graduate student affairs; and, most recently, she was the administrative head of the English Department’s undergraduate studies division.

Born in Cuxhaven, Germany, Kutzinski emigrated to the U.S. in 1978. A graduate of Smith College’s Diploma in American Studies Program, Kutzinski earned from Yale University an M.A. in African-American Studies and both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in American Studies.

(Last updated: July 2006)

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