Eyda M. Merediz
Associate Director for Graduate Academic Affairs and Strategic Initiatives, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Affiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center
emerediz@umd.edu
2215H Jiménez Hall
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Eyda M. Merediz arrived at the University of Maryland after finishing her doctoral degree at Princeton University and teaching at Union and Smith Colleges. Her academic interests concentrate primarily on the fields of Colonial Latin American Studies and Early Modern Transatlantic Literatures and Cultures. In addition to several articles and a critical edition, she has published a monograph, Refracted Images: The Canary Islands through a New World Lens (MRTS 2004) that uses the important colonial outpost of the Canary Islands to explore the fluidity of literary and cultural exchanges that prevailed in the Hispanic World of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She has also edited, with Santa Arias, the volume Approaches to Teaching the Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas (MLA 2008). She has also taught and researched on more contemporary Caribbean Studies, in specific Cuban cinema and literature and its trans-national dimension as shown in her edited volume, with Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Otros estudios transatlánticos: lecturas desde lo latinoamericano (IILI, 2009). More recently, she has undertaken a project centered on the writings of Bartolomé de las Casas and the appropriation of his legacy in the Caribbean.
Merediz has served as SLLC Associate Director for Graduate Affairs and Strategic Initiatives (2023-2026), SPAP Department Head (2015-2021), SPAP Director of Graduate Studies and Director of the Honors Program, as well as the Undergraduate Advisor for the Certificate on Latin American Studies. She has enriched curricular offerings at all levels in her areas of specialization, especially designing courses on Latin American Popular Culture mixing visual (Telenovelas) and literary materials. For the Office of International Programs, Merediz have designed several Study Abroad programs and courses for the winter term in Cuba (2002-03), Seville-Spain (2005-present), and Quito/Cuenca-Ecuador (2009-present), for the summer in Salamanca/Barcelona-Spain (2002-present), and also for the semester program in Seville-Spain (2012-present).
Publications
De islas, archipiélagos y periplos letrados: de vuelta a Colón en el siglo XIX/Of Islands, Archipelagos, and Intellectual Wanderings: Columbus in the 19th Century Once Again
Palabras clave: estudios culturales transatlánticos, Cuba, Islas Canarias, poesía, Cristóbal Colón, colonialidad, estudios coloniales caribeños
Author/Lead: Eyda M. MeredizCon un acercamiento transatlántico y relacional, este artículo reconsidera una producción poética del siglo XIX en torno a la figura romantizada de Cristóbal Colón en el Caribe hispano y en las Islas Canarias. La producción poética se lee como parte del meta-archipiélago formulado por Antonio Benítez Rojo, que parte de figuras fundacionales como Bartolomé de las Casas. El objetivo es reconsiderar las negociaciones de la condición colonial en tiempos decoloniales.
The Caribbean conundrum. José Antonio Saco’s Hispanic archive and the Black Atlantic
This essay revisits José Antonio Saco’s intellectual contribution to the Hispanic archive that emerges from the recovery of Bartolomé de las Casas’ texts and the colonial connections between indigenous slavery and the African slave trade.
Author/Lead: Eyda M. MeredizThis essay revisits José Antonio Saco’s intellectual contribution to the Hispanic archive that emerges from the recovery of Bartolomé de las Casas’ texts and the colonial connections between indigenous slavery and the African slave trade. Saco adheres to a notion of Hispanism, filtered through Las Casas, that facilitates a multiple and contradictory identification with coloniality, that allows him to anchor, his national, Caribbean, and universal historiographical project in the Hispanic and Black Atlantic. In turn, Saco and the Lascasian legacy that he rescued becomes an important colonial departure for contemporary theorizations: Antonio Benítez Rojo’s Caribbean readings of a paradoxical and complex repeating island, as well as Fernando Ortiz’ vision of a process of transculturation with repercussions beyond the Caribbean.
Geografía vs. Geopolítica: las Islas Canarias, América, África
The proximity of the Canary Islands to Africa determined in many ways how identity politics in the early modern period played out in a historiography that had to joggle geography, geopolitics and coloniality.
Author/Lead: Eyda M. MeredizEstudios coloniales latinoamericanos en el siglo XXI: Nuevos itinerarios. Ed. Stephanie Kirk. Pittsburgh: IILI.
Malinches canarias: hacia un mestizaje light
This article reviews historical and literary narratives about mestizaje in the Canary Islands in the early modern period.
Author/Lead: Eyda M. MeredizModernidad, colonialidad y escritura en América Latina. Ed. María Jesús Benítez. Comp. Valeria Añón y Loreley El Jaber. Tucumán, Argentina: Editorial de la Universidad Nacional de Tucumán (EDUNT).
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