William Acree
Professor of Spanish; American Culture Studies (Affiliate) and Performing Arts (Affiliate)
- Phone: 314-935-5145
- Email: acree@nospam.wustl.edu
William Acree’s scholarship and teaching explore the cultural history of Latin America, concentrating on the enduring impacts of everyday experiences and the ways cultural goods and activities inflect public life, politics, and identities. Acree’s work has engaged the connections between print media, daily reading habits, and their historical bearing on behaviors, attitudes, and actions (Everyday Reading); delved into the extravagant and surprising world of popular performance that allowed people to cross lines of social class, ethnicity, and race, thereby experiencing community in transformative ways (Staging Frontiers); studied the almost forgotten lives of Afro-Latin American writers (Jacinto Ventura de Molina y los caminos de la escritura negra en el Río de la Plata); and followed themes of collective identity, cultural marketplaces, nation formation, and the emergence of modern popular culture in Latin America in articles and edited books. His new project traces the pervasive influence of street cultures across Latin(x) America from 1800 to the present—from street food and street arts to informal economic exchanges and the ways people mobilize in public spaces.