Adriana Méndez Rodenas is emerita professor of Spanish at the University of Missouri and the University of Iowa. Past director of MU’s Afro-Romance Institute, her essays on Cuban anti-slavery narrative have appeared in Cuban Studies, Karib, and in her collection of essays Cuba en su imagen: Historia e identidad en la literatura cubana (2002).

She resurrected a pivotal figure of transnational Cuban literature in Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba: The Travels of Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Condesa de Merlin (1998), followed by her critical editions of Merlin’s Viaje a la Habana (2008) and Les esclaves dans les colonies espagnoles (2005), along with a forthcoming essay in The Palgrave Handbook of Transnational Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century.

Her essays on Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, a major figure in Spanish American and Spanish Romanticism,  have appeared in Hispanic Issues on Line (2017) and the forthcoming Cambridge History of Cuban Literature.

An expert on travel writing, her Transatlantic Travels to Nineteenth Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims (2014) retraces women’s journeys to post-Independence Latin America. Her work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including an NEH Fellowship for University Teachers, the Fulbright Distinguished Professorship at Uppsala University, Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study, and the Huntington Library.