Ricardo Andrade Fernández

Ricardo Andrade Fernández focuses on contemporary fiction from a sound studies approach. He is from Venezuela, and holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Literatures from the Pennsylvania State University and a M.A. in Hispanic Studies from the Universidad de Sevilla (Spain). His research explores how contemporary historical fiction resorts to sound to represent racial, social and cultural clashes of the colonial period, particularly embodied by African, indigenous, mixed-race and feminine alterities. Ricardo’s current project, The Sonorous City: Sounds and Itineraries of the Colonial Urban Space in Latin American Historical Fiction, examines how novels and films use sound in addressing the displacements of racial, political and gender alterities that inhabit the inharmonic space of seventeenth-century cities, specifically Mexico City, Lima, Salvador da Bahia, and Cartagena de Indias. Other interests include Afro-Latin American Literature, colonial writing and intersections between contemporary fiction and audiovisual media. Ricardo has taught a wide range of Spanish courses at the Universidad Central de Venezuela and Penn State, including upper-division classes such as Introduction to Hispanic Literature, Special Topics in Latin American Cultures, and Venezuelan Fictional Narrative. He has also worked as an Assistant Director of the PSU’s Study Abroad Program in Ronda, Spain.