Ethnic Studies
Born in January 1959 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a Cuban mother and an Irish-American father, Andrea O’Reilly Herrera is a Professor of Literature and Director of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. She received her Ph.D. in literature from the University of Delaware in 1993. Before assuming the Directorship of the Ethnic Studies Program at UCCS (fall 1999), she taught multicultural literature in a global context, with a special emphasis on U.S. minority and Caribbean/Post-colonial literature and theory, for the Department of English at the State University of New York in Fredonia (1993-1999). During her tenure at Fredonia, she helped found and co-direct the Women’s Studies Program and create and direct the Ethnic Studies Program. In addition to being the recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1997 (a system-wide teaching award), and the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research, Scholarship and Service at the University of Colorado (2004), she was recently selected as the 2005-2006 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies (Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland). O’Reilly Herrera is a published poet and the author of a number of critical essays on writers ranging from Charlotte Brontë and Marguerite Duras to Cristina García and Sandra Cisneros. She has also edited a collection of essays on the image of the family in British and American literature and an anthology of poems and short stories written by Latin American women writers. Her most recent publications include a collection of testimonials drawn from the Cuban exile community and their children residing in the United States (ReMembering Cuba: Legacy of a Diaspora, University of Texas Press, 2001), and a novel The Pearl of the Antilles (Bilingual/Review Press, 2001), which was awarded the Golden Quill Book Award (2005) and selected by the American Association of University Women for the 2005 Adelante reading list. The novel chronicles the lives of four generations of Cuban women and takes up the interrelated themes of exile, loss and the preservation and perpetuation of cultural memory. (Her watercolor painting served as the genesis of the novel and is featured as the cover of The Pearl of the Antilles.) More recently, O’Reilly Herrera completed a play based on her novel, which was presented and work-shopped by Theatreworks in Colorado Springs in December 2004 and selected as a semi-finalist in the “Stage-play” category of the 2005 Moondance International Film Festival and Literary Competition. In addition, her edited collection of essays Cuba: Idea of a Nation Displaced, which aims to place Cuban diasporic discourse in a more global context was releasd by SUNY Press in August, 2007; and she has co-edited a textbook for McGraw Hill titled The Matrix Reader: Examining the Dynamics of Oppression and Privilege, which presents an intersectional approach to the study of race and gender (forthcoming, 2008). She is currently working on a monograph (contracted by the University of Texas Press and tentatively titled Cuban Artists in Diaspora: Setting the Tent Against the House) that focuses on the traveling exhibition Café, which features a wide range of Cuban artists living outside of the island.