Research Bio

John Alba Cutler is a literary scholar who researches and teaches in the fields of Chicanx and Latinx literature, poetry and poetics, print culture, and contemporary American literature and culture. His book Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature (Oxford, 2015) argues that Chicano/a literature provides a powerful counter-discourse to sociological accounts of assimilation in the post-WWII era. He is now working on a book tentatively titled The Spirit of Modernism/o: Spanish-Language Newspapers and the Idea of Latinx Literature which explores literature's place in modernity by looking at the enormous archive of poetry, chronicles, short stories, and novels published in US Spanish-language newspapers in the early twentieth century.

Cutler is Associate Professor of English with affiliations in the departments of Ethnic Studies and Spanish & Portuguese. He is the co-editor of Latinx Literature in Transition, 1828-1992 (Cambridge, 2025) and one of the founding editors of the open-access academic journal Pasados: Recovering History, Imagining Latinidad. He has published articles in such journals as American Literary History, English Language Notes, Chiricú, and Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and contributed chapters to the Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement, and Culturas de la prensa en México. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Alice B. Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Research Expertise and Interest

Chicanx Latinx studies, poetry, 20th century American literature and culture