Patricia Barbeito

Patricia Felisa Barbeito (PhD, Comparative Literature, Harvard University) is professor of American literatures. She teaches courses on race and ethnicity in American literature, the African-American literary tradition, captivity and prison narratives, magical realism, the Latin American novel, and noir fiction and film.

Currently, her research focuses on African-American literature and culture of 1940s-1960s, in particular the protest literature of the period. Based on this research, she is working on a book about African-American author Chester Himes titled One Jump Ahead of Disaster: The Politics of Race, Interracial Sex, and Literary Style in Chester Himes’ Writing.

She is also an award-winning translator of contemporary Greek fiction and poetry. Her translations include Their Smell Makes Me Want to Cry by Menis Koumandareas (co-translated with Vangelis Calotychos; Birmingham University Press, 2004), Elias Maglinis’ The Interrogation (Birmingham University Press, 2013), short-listed for the 2014 Greek National Translation Award and winner of the 2013 Modern Greek Studies Association’s Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize; Tatiana Averoff’s Portrait of the Politician as a Young Man (Peter Lang, Byzantine and Neohellenic Studies, 2018); M. Karagatsis, The Great Chimera (Aiora, 2019); Amanda Michalopoulou’s God’s Wife (Dalkey Archive, 2019), short-listed for that year’s US National Translation Award; and Christos Chomenidis’ Niki (Other Press, 2023), shortlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize. She is the recipient of a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for M. Karagatsis’ Junkermann (forthcoming from Aiora Press).