Christopher Britt

Chris
Title:
Professor of Spanish, Director of Spanish Literature
Office:
515
Phone:
202-994-6339
Email:
[email protected]

Professor Britt regularly teaches courses on modernity, the historical avant-gardes, and the dictatorships of post-imperial Spain and post-colonial Latin America.  He earned his B.A. in Spanish at Colgate University and his Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures at Princeton University.  He is the author of Quixotism: The Denial of Spain’s Loss of Empire (2005); Imperial Idiocy: A Reflection on Forced Displacement in the Americas (2017), and, with Eduardo Subirats and Paul Fenn, Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction: Intellectuals, World Disorder, and the Politics of Empire (2018).  Additionally, he is the author of numerous essays that study how intellectuals participated in the formation of national and pan-national identities in Spain and Latin America.  He is currently working on a new book project, tentatively titled “Modern translatio imperii,” which aims to study the various roles that intellectuals played in the transfer of imperial power from Spain to the United States at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.

Publications

Books 

  • Intellectuals in the Society of Spectacle. 2021.  Co-authored by C. Britt and E. Subirats.  (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).
  • Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction: Intellectuals, World Disorder and the Politics of Empire.  2018.  Co-authored by C. Britt, P. Fenn, and E. Subirats. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Series in Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice.)
  • Imperial Idiocy: A Reflection on Forced Displacement in the Americas. 2017.  Series in Inter-American Studies, Vol 20.  (Tempe, Arizona: Bilingual Press.)
  • Quixotism: The Denial of Spain’s Loss of Empire. 2005. Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture.  (Albany, NY: SUNY Press.)

Chapters/Essays

  • “Esclarecimiento y el imperio de la libertad” in Circuit Circus. (Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2017):167-172. 
  • "El ensayo como un instrumento de regeneración" in Circuit Circus. (Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2017): 85-90.
  • “La irrealidad histórica de España” El Viejo Topo Núm 354-355 (Barcelona, Spain: July/August 2017): 28-39. 
  • “Intelectuales e idiotas” in Almanaque Literario (México: Universidad de Guanajuato y Colegio de San Luis) (May, 2015): 79-82.
  • “Madariaga’s Quixotism: The Imperial Nostalgia of an Exiled Spanish Liberal” in eHumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies (University of California, Santa Barbara) (August 2014): 148-170.
  • “Desde la Casa de Salomón hasta la Research University” Revista Valenciana, Estudios de Filosofía y Letras Vol. 11 (Universidad de Guanajuato, Guanajuato, México, August, 2013): 69-90.
  • “Los límites de la solidaridad: etnografías de salvación, novelas de perdición, y la Selva de Matavén” Antípoda (Bogotá, Colombia, December, 2012): 273-292.
  • “Reivindicación del esclarecimiento” El Viejo Topo (July, 2011): 1-8.
  • “Memoria de un letrado desplazado” in Escritura y esquizofrenia (México: Universidad de Guanajuato y Colegio de San Luis, 2010).
  • "Torture, Tongues, and Treason" South Central Review, Vol. 24, no.1 (Spring 2007) pages 56-72.
  • "Reflections on Spain’s Essayistic Hall of Mirrors,” Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies, Volume 5, 2007.