Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Department of Spanish and Portuguese

   

Rory O'Bryen is interested in post-Boom Latin American literature, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Colombian culture and history. He is the author of Literature, Testimony and Cinema in Contemporary Colombian Culture: Spectres of "La Violencia" (London: Tamesis, 2008)). He has also published articles on Borges, Fernando Vallejo, McOndo and Roberto Bolaño.

His current research projects include a book on Latin American popular culture (co-edited with Geoffrey Kantaris), and a book on the Río Magdalena (Colombia). The latter explores the transformation of Colombia's social and political landscape between 1850 and the present day. It takes the river both as a geographical fact and as a rhetorical figure that is central to understanding the formation of national culture between these dates. Yet by undertaking interdisciplinary readings of a wide range of key cultural artifacts - from the nineteenth-century romance to the late twentieth-century ‘narco-zoo’ - it also pursues the long-standing fragility of the relationship between nation-formation and global process.

He is also one of the editors of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.