Ignacio Infante

Ignacio Infante

​Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish
Co-Director, Center for the Literary Arts
Associate Director, Center for the Humanities
Study Abroad Coordinator, Comparative Literature and WU Madrid Abroad Programs (RLL)
PhD, Rutgers University
research interests:
  • Modern Poetry
  • Modernist and Avant-Garde Poetics
  • Iberian Cultural Studies
  • Transatlantic Literary Studies
  • Comparative Literature
  • Translation Theory/History
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    ​Ignacio Infante's main fields of research include modern poetry, modernist and avant-garde poetics, Iberian cultural studies, transatlantic literary studies, comparative literature, and translation theory/history.

    Professor Infante is the author of After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics across the Atlantic (Fordham UP, 2013). This book examines from a transnational and interlingual approach the role of translation in the transatlantic flow of modern poetry and poetics, and includes chapters on poets Fernando Pessoa, Vicente Huidobro, Federico García Lorca and the Berkeley Renaissance, Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, and Kamau Brathwaite.  His second scholarly monograph, A Planetary Avant-Garde: Experimental Poetics, Transnational Literature Networks, and the Legacy of Iberian Colonialism (1909-1929), under contract with the University of Toronto Press (Toronto Iberic), is a comparative study of the poetic and socio-historical features of key experimental literature networks emerging across the world during the Historical Avant-Garde, and their various responses to the colonial regimes of Spain and Portugal.

    His research articles and reviews have been published in scholarly journals such as the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies (Routledge), Variaciones Borges (Pittsburgh), Revista Hispánica Moderna (Penn Press), Modern Philology (U Chicago Press), Comparative Literature (Duke UP), and The Comparatist (UNC Press).  Within the field of Translation Studies he has guest-edited a special issue of the journal Translation Review (issue 95,2016) on contemporary translational literature, as well as published book chapters included in Lawrence Venuti’s edited volume Teaching Translation (Routledge, 2017), and in Kelly Washbourne and Ben Van Wyke’s The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation (2018, co-authored with Annelise Finegan Wasmoen).  A literary translator, Prof. Infante has also translated into Spanish John Ashbery’s poetry collection A Wave/ Una Ola (Lumen/Penguin Random House, 2003),Will Self’s novel How the Dead Live / Cómo viven los muertos (Random House Mondadori, 2002), as well as co-translated with Michael Leong into English Vicente Huidobro’s Temblor de cielo (Skyquake: Tremor of Heaven). 

    His courses for the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures have generally focused on 20th-century Iberian and modern transatlantic literature. Some of these courses include the surveys SPA 311 (Hispanic Culture and Civilization, Summer Institute in Madrid), SPA 341 (Literary and Cultural Studies in Spanish), SPA 342 (Iberian Literatures and Cultures), SPA 405 (Culture in Crisis), as well as the graduate seminars “The Avant-Garde in Spain: Poetry/Cinema/Visual Arts,” and “Poetics and Politics in Democratic Spain.”

    Professor Infante has been the recipient of Fulbright, and Getty international fellowships, among other academic grants and honors.  He has served as International Relations Chair of the Modernist Studies Association (2016-2018), and is a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Translation Review.  Currently, he serves as Reviews Editor (Peninsular) of the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, as co-director of graduate studies in Comparative Literature, and as Associate Director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University.

    After Translation

    After Translation