(Girardot, Colombia, 1946) is Trowbridge Scholar in Literary Studies and Emeritus Professor of Comparative and World Literature, Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Illinois. He has published books and monographs (authored and edited) on the modern novel (Gabriel García Márquez, Thomas Mann, James Joyce), the conquest period in Latin America, the Holocaust, Comparative Literature as a discipline, recent Colombian literature (Gabriel García Márquez, Álvaro Mutis, Fernando Cruz Kronfly), and comparative civilizational analysis. He has been awarded several major national fellowships, including two each from the Newberry Library and the John Carter Brown Library, as well as two senior fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
