Vera Kutzinski

Kutzinski's work is grounded in Critical race theory and Afro-Diasporic literary studies. The Daily Daily (1989), her English-language version of Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s El Diario que diario, was the first of her many translations. Among other things, the concept and practice of "New World writing" she analyzed in writings by the work of Puerto Rican-American modernist William Carlos Williams, African American poet Jay Wright, and Cuban poet-activist Guillén led to the New World Studies series at the University Press at Virginia,[6] which published Sugar’s Secret as the series’ inaugural volume. In The World of Langston Hughes, Kutzinski continues the work she began in Afro-Hispanic Literature, her contribution to the Cambridge History of Latin American Literature in 1996,[7] by focusing on Hughes’s contact with Latin American writers and the Spanish-language versions of his writings that circulated in Latin America. Rachel Farebrother praised the book for its "rigorous archival research", its "comprehensive inventory of translations of Hughes’s writings into Spanish", and a "truly internationalist scope that never underestimates the importance of specific historical and linguistic contexts."[8]

In addition to editing the section on Anglophone Caribbean Literature in A History of Literature in the Caribbean (2001) and contributing an essay on Caribbean Literary Criticism to The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, Kutzinski has also published articles on Caribbean writers other than Guillen, notably Wilson Harris, Gabriel García Márquez, Erna Brodber, Dany Bébel-Gisler, Shani Mootoo, Plácido (Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdés) and Fernando Ortiz.[9]

With Writing-between-Worlds: TransArea Studies and the Literatures without a Fixed Abode,[10] her translation of a monograph by Ottmar Ette, Kutzinski, broadened the scope of her previous transnational work on the Americas. This shift toward Atlantic Studies is also reflected in her essay on Langston Hughes’s poems in the post-World War II Germanies.[11]

Kutzinski’s work on the Prussian scientific traveler Alexander von Humboldt’s writings on the Americas is another part of her turn toward transatlantic contexts. Together with Ette and a team of translators and scholars, the HiE project has published three critical editions of Humboldt’s writings: the Political Essay on the Island of Cuba (2011),[12] Views of the Cordilleras and the Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the New Continent (2012),[13] and the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (2019).[14] In addition, Kutzinski translated The Complete Drawings from the American Travel Diaries in 2018. The international Alexander von Humboldt Conference Kutzinski organized at Vanderbilt in 2009 produced the essay collection Alexander von Humboldt and the Americas (2012). That same year, a special issue Kutzinski edited for Atlantic Studies became the collection Alexander von Humboldt’s Transatlantic Personae.[15]

• Against the American Grain: Myth and History in William Carlos Williams, Jay Wright, and Nicolás Guillén (1987) ISBN 9780801833304
• Sugar's Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (1993) ISBN 9780813914671
• The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas (2012) ISBN 9780801466243
• Writing-between-Worlds. TransArea Studies and the Literatures-without-a-fixed-Abode by Ottmar Ette (2016) ISBN 9783110462876
• Alexander von Humboldt: The Complete Drawings from the American Travel Diaries. Ed. Mayer and Ottmar Ette (2018). ISBN 9783791383545

• "The Logic of Wings: Gabriel García Márquez and Afro American Literature." Latin American Literary Review 13 (1985): 133 146.
• "Changing Permanences: Historical and Literary Revisionism in Robert Hayden's 'Middle Passage." Callaloo 9 (1986): 171-83.
• "Unseasonal Flowers: Nature and History in Plácido and Jean Toomer." Yale Journal of Criticism 3:2 (Spring 1990): 153-179.
• "Borders and Bodies: America, the United States, and the Caribbean." New Centennial Review 1.2 (2001): 53-86.
• "Wilson Harris’s Phantom Bodies. Re-reading the Subject." Theatre of the Arts. Wilson Harris and the Caribbean. Ed. Hena Maes-Jelinek and Benedicte Ledent. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2002: 139-151.
• "Caribbean Literary History and its Sexual Others." Caribbean Interfaces. Ed. Lieven D’hulst, Jean-Marc Moura, Liesbeth De Bleeker and Nadia Lie. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007: 35-45.
• "Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Scholarship as Science for Living" by Ottmar Ette. Translated and edited, with an Introduction (A Survival Kit for the Humanities?). PMLA 125.4 (2010): 977-993.