Claire Solomon ’98

  • Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature

Areas of Study

Education

  • BA, Oberlin College, 1998
  • MA, M.Phil, Yale University, 2001
  • PhD, Yale University, 2007

Biography

I teach all areas of modern and contemporary (19th-21st century) Latin American literature and culture, as well as courses in comparative literature, literary analysis, and theory.

  • 20th and 21st century Latin American and Comparative Literature
  • Literary and Cultural Theory
  • North and South American Yiddish Theater
  • Popular and Avant-garde Theater
  • Pop Culture
  • Continental and American Philosophy
  • Music and Music Theory
  • Gender Studies
  • Diaspora Studies

Book

  • Fictions of the Bad Life: The Naturalist Prostitute and Her Avatars in Latin American Literature, 1880–2010 (Ohio State UP, 2014)

Articles

 

"Yoga as World Literature: Somaesthetic Ekphrasis and (Mis)Translation." Andrew Edgar and William Morgan, eds. Somaesthetics and Sport (Leiden: Brill, 2022): 183-209.

"Musical Comedy as Compromise Formation: Judío and Judía (1926), by Ivo Pelay." In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. Special Issue: Yiddish and the Transnational in Latin America (2021). https://ingeveb.org/articles/musical-comedy-as-compromise-formation

"Machine Translation and Translation Machines in Roberto Arlt’s Los siete locos (1929) and Los lanzallamas (1931)." Mutatis Mutandis: Revista Latinoamericana de traducción 11:2 (2018): 6-23. https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.mut.v11n2a08

Fiction and Music

Spacelord and Queen (libretto). Commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra. Music by Lisa Bielawa. Commissioned by The Louisville Orchestra. March, 2023.

Centuries in the Hours (libretto and film treatment). Music by Lisa Bielawa. Co-commissioned by Kaufman Music Center, May 2021.
https://www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/mch/event/lisa-bielawa-centuries-in-the-hours/.

"A-1.” Waxwing Literary Journal 16 (Fall 2018). https://waxwingmag.org/items/issue16/38_Solomon-A-1.php.

Spring 2024

When World Literature “Discovered” Latin America — HISP 100
Minor Literature, World Literature, and the Limits of Translation — HISP 456
Capstone — HISP 501

Fall 2024

Radical Reading & Writing: Imagination in the World — FYSP 073
Introduction to Literary Analysis — HISP 306
Capstone — HISP 501

Notes

Claire Solomon Publishes Book

September 4, 2014

Claire Solomon, Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies, has published a book, titled Fictions of the Bad Life: The Naturalist Prostitute and Her Avatars in Latin American Literature, 1880–2010 (Ohio State UP, 2014).

The book first examines how legal, medical, and philosophical thought converged in Naturalist literature of prostitution during the consolidation of the modern Latin American states. It then traces the persistence of styles, themes, and stereotypes about women, sex, ethnicity, and race in the twentieth and twenty-first century literature to illustrate how at very different moments—the turn of the twentieth century, the 1920s–30s, and finally the turn of the twenty-first century—the past is rewritten to accommodate contemporary desires for historical belonging and national identity, even as these efforts inevitably re-inscribe aspects of the colonial history they are trying to change.

News

Teachable Moments

May 22, 2023

Nicolas Zamora’s Oberlin experience prepared him for the classrooms of Spain.

Teaching the Cultural Aspect of Language

June 22, 2015

Granted tenure in April 2015 , Claire Solomon ’98 teaches courses in modern and contemporary (19th-21st century) Latin American literature and culture, comparative literature, literary analysis, and...