Gordon Brotherston, Professor

Building 260, Room 215
650 725 9850
jgbrothe@stanford.edu

Interests

The cumulative history of the American continent; tropical American culture, from earliest times; Native and later American literature; the Mexican codices and the intellectual interface between the 'Old and New Worlds; poetry and narrative in Latin America; literary translation, especially translation and script; English self-promotion within Britain

Education

Ph.D., University of Cambridge, St. Catharine's College, 1965
B.A., 1st Class Honours, University of Leeds, 1961

Current Courses

Modernismo;
New World Creation Narratives;
Roots and Routes: Narrative Geographies of the Americas (IHUM)

Selected Publications

La América indígena en su literatura. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997. Palabras preliminares de Miguel León Portilla. 588 pages. Color plates, figures, maps.
Footprints through Time: Mexican Pictorial Manuscripts. Bloomington: Lilly Library. 1997. 96pp., 4 colour plates, figures, tables, maps
Painted Books from Mexico. Codices in the United Kingdom collections and the World they Represent. London: British Museum Press (University of Washington Press in the USA). 1995. 224 pp., 50 colour plates, 150 figures, tables, maps.
Book of the Fourth World: Reading the native Americas through their Literature. New York and London: Cambridge University Press. 1992. 478pp. 18 colour plates, 68 figures, tables, maps.
Image of the New World. The American Continent portrayed in Native Texts. London and New York: Thames and Hudson. 1979. 324 pp. US paperback 1981.
The Emergence of the Latin American Novel. London and New York: Cambridge University Press. 1977. 164 pp. Paperback edition 1979.
Latin American Poetry: Origins and Presence. Cambridge University Press 1975
Manuel Machado. A Revaluation. London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968. 162pp.

Complete List of Publications (PDF)

Background

Gordon Brotherston (Ph.D. Cambridge) has held professorial posts in Literature, Comparative Literature, Spanish & Portuguese, Folklore, and Anthropology at universities in Britain (King’s College, London; Essex), USA (Iowa; Indiana, Bloomington), Canada (British Columbia), Mexico (ENAH; UNAM), and Brazil (São Paulo). At Essex he was a founder member of the Literature Department and directed the Latin American Centre, as well as being head of department and Dean of the School of Comparative Studies. In both Mexico and Brazil he has formed new groups of graduate students working on native America. His work focuses chiefly on literature and culture in the Americas and comprises over 140 scholarly articles, several editions and anthologies, a volume of collected translations, and have been translated into several languages. He contributed to the Times Literary Supplement for over 25 years and has participated in numerous radio and television programs. He has lectured throughout Europe and the Americas, as well as in North Africa, Hong Kong, and Australia. Institutions from which he has received awards include the British Academy, British Council, The Nuffield Foundation, Rotary International, Astor Foundation, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, American Philosophical Society, Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, FAPESP (Brazil), CNPq (Brazil), CONACYT (Mexico), and Stanford Humanities Center.

Current Projects

Completing The Turning Year, a study of the understanding and articulation of time in the calendars and codices (ancient books) of Mesoamerica. This has been commissioned as a British Museum Occasional Paper and in turn forms the basis of the broader study Dream and Number in Tropical America. Working out from the codices, this deals with questions of epistemology and the intellectual legacy of tropcial America, and the interface with Europe that began in the 16th century. This larger project is also designed to draw on the results of long-standing research into toponymy, and issues of translating and transcribing (native) American texts.