Prof. Adriana Méndez Rodenas been invited to collaborate in the The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature, edited by Vicky Unruh (emerita, U of Kansas) and Jacqueline Loss (U of Connecticut).   They have asked her to write a chapter on "Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Human Rights Advocacy, Early Feminist Thought, and Public Intellectual Life."  Born in Camagüey in Central Cuba, Gómez de Avellaneda moved to Spain at an early age and developed a long and fruitful literary career there, in many genres: poetry, theater, narrative, and essay.  Known in Cuban letters as “la peregrina”, the pilgrim, because of her transatlantic connection, GGA is hailed as a major Romantic writer in both Cuba and Spain. She also wrote Sab (1841), the first anti-slavery novel in the Americas, and founded a series of journals both in Madrid and Cuba where she wrote early feminist essays that denounced women’s social condition. 

One of the reviewers of the project states that “This proposal for a history of Cuban literature promises to define the field for half a century because it navigates the delicate balance of insular and global perspectives, while keeping the key themes of exceptionality, national literature and transculturating diasporas in tension throughout.”