Roberto González Echevarría

Roberto González Echevarría (born 28 November 1943, Sagua La Grande, Cuba) is a Cuban-born critic of Latin American literature and culture.He is the Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature at Yale University.

During González Echevarría's studies in Florida, he was a catcher for the Wahoos, a minor league baseball team, an experience which left him with a crooked index finger. He received his bachelor's from the University of South Florida (1964), masters from Indiana University (1966) and doctorate from Yale (1970). He also holds honorary doctorates from Colgate University (1987), the University of South Florida (2000), and Columbia University (2002). In 1999 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. After receiving his doctorate, González Echevarría taught at Yale and then at Cornell (1971-1977), where he was one of the first editors of the journal Diacritics. Since 1977 he has taught at Yale, where he was awarded the first endowed chair in Spanish (R. Selden Rose). In 1991, he was named Bass Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature, and in 1995, Sterling Professor, the highest-ranking university chair at Yale.

His Myth and Archive won the 1989-90 MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize and the Latin American Studies Association’s 1992 Bryce Wood Book Award, and The Pride of Havana received the Dave Moore Award for the Best Baseball Book of 2002. His Love and the Law in Cervantes (2005) had its origin in his 2002 DeVane Lectures at Yale. His Lecturas y relecturas won the 2014 Premio Anual de la Crítica (Book Prize in Criticism) in Cuba.

An international symposium was held in his honor at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Arecibo (2002) and an issue (no. 33, 2004) of Encuentro de la cultura cubana was published in his honor. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In March 2011, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal of 2010 by President Obama. He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Social Science Research Council.

According to the Yale Daily News, the first time power and sexual abuse allegations emerged against Gonzalez-Echevarría was through an anonymous letter distributed to Yale University students and faculty in 2015. This situation prompted the appearance of more allegations and followed a university review of the Spanish and Portuguese Department, and a change of leadership.According to the university newspaper, Gonzalez-Echeverría was put on leave without providing a public explanation.In 2017, a former Spanish professor at Yale filled a lawsuitclaiming that the department perpetuated a culture of harassment and discrimination. According to the lawsuit, Gonzalez-Echevarria, department chair Rolena Adorno and department professor Noel Valis made “unsupportive and negative” statements in retaliation for plaintiff’s speaking out against discrimination and harassment, which had an impact in the plaintiff’s tenure denial in 2015.

• Cervantes's Don Quixote (Yale University Press, 2015)
• Monstros e archivos (University of Minas Gerais, 2014)
• Lecturas y relecturas. Estudios sobre literatura y cultura (Capiro, 2014)
• Modern Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2012)
• Cuban Fiestas (Yale University Press, 2010)
• Fuenteovejuna by Lope de Vega. Intro. Roberto González Echevarría. Trans. G. J. Racz(Yale University Press, 2010)
• Celestina by Fernando de Rojas. Intro. Roberto González Echevarría. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (Yale University Press, 2009)
• Oye mi son: testimonios y ensayos sobre literatura hispanoamericana (Renacimiento, 2008)
• Cartas de Carpentier (Verbum, 2008)
• Love and the Law in Cervantes (Yale University Press, 2005). Spanish translation: Amor y ley en Cervantes (Gredos, 2008)
• Crítica práctica, práctica crítica (2002)
• The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball (1999)
• Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literatures (1993). Spanish translation: La prole de Celestina: continuidades del barroco en las literaturas española e hispanoamericana (Colibrí, 1999)
• Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Duke, 1990; 1998)
• La ruta de Severo Sarduy (Ediciones del Norte, 1986)
• The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature (1985)
• Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Cornell University Press, 1977; University of Texas Press, 1990)
• Relecturas: estudios de literatura cubana (Monte Avila, 1976)
• Editor, The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories (Oxford, 1997)
• Editor, Don Quixote: A Case Book (Oxford, 2005)
• Editor, Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana (Cambridge University) (Gredos, 2006)
• Co-editor, Cuba: un siglo de literatura (1902-2002) (2004)
• Co-editor, En un lugar de La Mancha: estudios cervantinos en honor de Manuel Durán (Almar, 1999)
• Co-editor, The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature (Cambridge, 1996)