Susan D. Rivera

Associate Professor of Spanish

Ortega Hall 421
(505) 277-4942
E-mail: susanar@unm.edu

Research areas:

• Nineteenth century Peninsular literature
• Twentieth century Peninsular literature
• Twenty-first century Peninsular literature

Susan Rivera first realized her a passion for literature as she sat around the kitchen table with her brother and two sisters listening to their mother tell stories, the same stories that she had heard from her mother while sitting around the flame of a kerosene lamp in her small village of Quitupan, Jalisco. Later that passion was kindled when she heard relatives, neighbors and friends in Santa Fe relate their own stories in the beautiful New Mexican dialect. At the University of New Mexico, she had the privilege of studying with extraordinary professors of what was then the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, she knew that literature was going to be a determining force in her life. She first traveled to Spain in 1979 and quickly realized that knowledge of Spanish stories was essential for her to complete not only her formal education but also her sentimental one. Since then, she became one of the leading experts on the second generation of Spanish poets exiled in Mexico after the Spanish civil war, her anthology of this important, but relatively unknown group of writers, Ultima voz del exilio; El grupo poético hispano-mexicano(1990) was published by Editorial Hiperión. Her other work includes studies of poets Antonio Machado, Valle-Inclán, Vicente Aleixandre, Gerardo Diego, Eladio Cabañero, Claudio Rodríguez and Angel González as well as novelists Pérez Galdós and Caballero Bonald, her critical edition of the latter's Ágata ojo de gato(1994) appeared in Cátedra. Currently at UNM, her work is on the image of women through Spanish literature and film.