Roxanna Curto is an Associate Professor of French and Spanish at the University of Iowa. She holds an A.B. in Romance Studies from Harvard and a Ph.D. in French from Yale. She was an Assistant Professor of French at Illinois State from 2008 until 2011. In her research, Professor Curto explores the representation of cultural elements such as technology and sports in literature from the French- and Spanish-speaking worlds.
Her first book, Inter-tech(s): Colonialism and the Question of Technology in Francophone Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2016) examines the representation of modern technologies in the works of Francophone writers from Africa and the Caribbean.
Her second book, Sporting Identities: Global Sports and National Cultures in French and Francophone Literature (in progress) considers aspects of physical culture (exercise, leisure and sports) in literature written in French from Europe and/or the Francophone world, such as the Olympic Games, soccer in France and Africa, hockey in Canada, the Tour de France, and Senegalese wrestling, focusing on their role in the formation of national identities.
She has also published a series of articles exploring connections between Aimé Césaire and Latin American literature, in order to argue that Césaire’s works can be interpreted from the perspectives of Afro-cubismo and negrismo, magical realism, and the “theater of development” movement; and several essays analyzing the role of technology in the work of poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, and Denis Roche.