Gallo, Rubén 1969-

PERSONAL:

Born December 22, 1969, in Mexico; son of Rubén Gallo Ruiz (a businessman) and Carmen Godinez (a chemist); partner of Terence Gower (an artist). Education: Yale University, B.A., 1991; Columbia University, Ph.D., 2001.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Office—Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures, Princeton University, 359 E. Pyne Bldg., Princeton, NJ 08544. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Academic and writer. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, assistant professor, then associate professor of Spanish-American literature, 2002—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, Modern Language Association, 2005, for Mexican Modernity: The Avant-garde and the Technological Revolution; Behrman Fellow, Princeton University, 2007-09.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) The Mexico City Reader, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 2004.

New Tendencies in Mexican Art: The 1990s, Palgrave Macmillan (New York, NY), 2004.

México D.F.: Lecturas Para Paseantes, Turner (Madrid, Spain), 2005.

Mexican Modernity: The Avant-garde and the Technological Revolution, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2005.

(With Ignacio Padilla) Heterodoxos Mexicanos: Una antología dialogada, Fondo de Cultura Económica (Mexico City, Mexico), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Rubén Gallo is a Mexican academic and writer. Born in Mexico in the 1960s, Gallo completed his higher education in the United States. He earned a bachelor of arts degree from Yale University, followed by a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2001. Gallo remained in New York while working at New Jersey's Princeton University. He started as an assistant professor and was later promoted to associate professor of Spanish-American literature.

Writing with Lorna Scott Fox, Gallo published The Mexico City Reader with the University of Wisconsin Press in 2004. The book collects essays from Mexican scholars, artists, novelists, journalists, and cultural critics writing about the Mexican capital city. The book is divided into six different sections under the headers of "Mexico City on Paper," "Places," "The Metro," "Monuments," "Eating and Drinking," and "Urban Renewal/Urban Disasters." Olga B. Wise, writing in Library Journal, noted that the book's "translation is commendable—both readable and lively." Wise found the book useful "for travel, urban history, and Latin American collections." Diane E. Davis, reviewing the book in the Journal of Latin American Studies, praised many of the book's essays. However, she noted that her enjoyment of those essays was "partially marred by the snide and condescending tone that colours a handful of other essays." She continued: "Whether coming in the form of an indictment of the city's economic or political elite … or in the vaguely contemptuous renderings of middle- and lower-class culture … a surprisingly broad array of the city's residents seem ‘othered’ by their chroniclers." Davis concluded, however, that "the embeddedness of political and urban critique that colours many of the essays does serve its purpose. Even as it may overly narrow the terrain for a genuinely sympathetic representation of the city, and by so doing highlight the interpretive and political distance between some of the chroniclers and the chronicled, it also helps us to understand the larger aims of most of the essayists and why they have chosen certain subjects for commentary. In this sense, The Mexico City Reader further fulfills its ambition: to showcase leading literary voices of the city while also giving us a clue as to what captures their imagination and why."

Gallo also published New Tendencies in Mexican Art: The 1990s in 2004. Gallo published two more books in 2005. Writing in Spanish, Gallo published Mèxico D.F.: Lecturas Para Paseantes with Madrid-based Turner Publishing. He also published Mexican Modernity: The Avant-garde and the Technological Revolution with MIT Press. The book looks at how cameras, typewriters, radio, cement, and stadiums have altered the face of Mexican art and literature since the Mexican Revolution. Mexican Modernity won the 2005 Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize from the Modern Language Association.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Journal of Latin American Studies, August, 2006, Diane E. Davis, review of The Mexico City Reader, p. 669.

Library Journal, October 15, 2004, Olga B. Wise, review of The Mexico City Reader, p. 79.

Modernism/Modernity, January, 2007, Tace Hedrick, review of Mexican Modernity: The Avant-garde and the Technological Revolution, p. 177.

Reference & Research Book News, February, 2005, review of The Mexico City Reader, p. 77.

Times Higher Education Supplement, June 9, 2006, Ian Jacobs, review of Mexican Modernity, p. 36.

Times Literary Supplement, March 4, 2005, Lily Ford, review of The Mexico City Reader, p. 27.

ONLINE

Princeton University, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures Web site,http://spo.princeton.edu/ (December 10, 2007), author profile.

Rubén Gallo Home Page,http://rubengallo.com (December 10, 2007), author biography.