Headshot of Ada Torres
Ada Torres Areas of Study:
Department of History
 Email Interests:

Intellectual, cultural, urban, and economic history; colonial and modern Latin America; U.S.-Latin America relations; Mexico; Cuba; the Dominican Republic; Puerto Rico; Spain; history of the idea of Latin America; history of Hispanic and Latin American Studies; history of education; cosmopolitanism; global history; comparative history; the long nineteenth century; nationalism; liberalism; the modern research university; history of the humanities and social sciences; the long sixteenth century; history of capitalism.
Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences

Ada Torres is a historian of modern Latin America and the Caribbean whose research focuses on the history of cities, intellectual culture, and education across the region. My dissertation, Re-Routing Latin Americanism: Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s “Hispanic America,” 1897-1921, examines the formative years of the Dominican-born intellectual Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1884-1946), one of the earliest professional Latin Americanists. By tracing his trajectory as a literary critic, historian, and professor of Spanish and Latin American literatures across Santo Domingo, New York, Havana, Mexico City, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, and Berkeley, California, the dissertation demonstrates how he influenced generations of academic and public intellectuals throughout the Americas. It also explores how he conceptualized and taught the cultural history of Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean within the broader traditions of the humanities. Rather than treating Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean as intellectually peripheral, the dissertation shows how he situated the region’s post-Columbian traditions of humanistic learning and education reform within ongoing exchanges with Europe and the United States.