Cristina Esteves-Wolff is a scholar and teacher of modern and contemporary Latin American literature and intellectual history with a focus on the Hispanic Caribbean and the afterlives of slavery in the Atlantic World. Her work focuses on questions of race, imperialism, and political life in cultural production to examine processes of subject formation in colonial and postcolonial contexts. She holds a B.A. in Literature from Yale University, a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law, and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.
Cristina’s dissertation, Imagining the Age of Revolution: Authoritarianism and the Afterlives of Slavery in Twentieth-Century Hispanic Caribbean Narrative, studies twentieth-century historical fiction from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico that represents eighteenth- and nineteenth-century caudillos, personalist authoritarian political leaders, in slave societies across the Atlantic world. She posits that historical novels critique twentieth-century non-democratic structures in the Caribbean and abroad, revealing the authoritarian political structures of the twentieth century as afterlives of slavery and the racial imaginaries perpetuated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial projects.
Recent Courses in RLL:
- SPAN 20100 Language, History, and Culture I (Spring 2022, Autumn 2022)
- SPAN 22424 Between History and Fiction: Race, Modernity, and Revolution in the Hispanic Caribbean (Spring 2024, Winter 2025)