Roberto González Echevarría

Roberto González Echevarría is a Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature at Yale University and one of the world’s foremost critics of Spanish and Latin American literature. He is the author of the definitive Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative and The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball. Echevarría’s scholarship is vast, covering everything from the Spanish Golden Age (Cervantes) to the modern "Boom" writers like García Márquez and Borges. He is known for his deep philological knowledge and his ability to place literature within the broader context of law, science, and anthropology.\n\nEchevarría’s work challenges the way we read Latin American history. He argues that the region's literature is deeply entangled with its archival history—the bureaucratic documents of the colonial era. He has received the National Humanities Medal for his contributions to literary criticism. Echevarría is also a cultural historian, famously using baseball as a lens to examine Cuban national identity. His writing is elegant, erudite, and demanding, insisting on the importance of the Spanish literary tradition in the global canon. He continues to mentor scholars and shape the study of Hispanic letters, bridging the gap between European tradition and New World innovation.