Celebrating faculty: Amauri Gutiérrez Coto

Amauri Gutiérrez-Coto, professor of Spanish

What is the focus of your research?

My main area of research is Caribbean studies. I came from a literary studies background, but I tried a holistic approach to my research topic based on an interdisciplinary and intersectional perspective. When I arrived at Lafayette College, I was working in the Cuban studies division at University of Havana. Back then, my interest was centered on the philosophical and theological consequences of Catholicism in a group of Cuban writers, known as Orígenes. In 2008, one of my single-author books won the National Prize of Essay “José María Heredia,” awarded by the Cuban Union of Writers and Artists. Among these and other distinctions, I received two grants from Spain’s Ministry of Culture (2010, 2015).

At Lafayette, my research interests changed to how the cultural production of marginalized individuals is/was constantly erased from historical discourses. My first text published on this topic was about transgender writers in Latin America and the Caribbean, and I also developed my main volumes in the last years on a second promotion of Cuban Black writers in the 19th century.

In addition to my research, as a poet I published four volumes, two of them after my Lafayette appointment.

How do students benefit from your scholarship and research? 

I taught the only two courses exclusively devoted to inquiry about Afro-descendant and LGBTQ+ cultural and literary production in the Spanish curriculum. These two communities were absent from our previous curriculum. In terms of U.S. Latinos, Prof. Sidney Donnell was teaching an excellent course in our First-Year Seminar program, but our previous Spanish program had that intellectual gap, and I created a course about Caribbean American Latinos in New York City. I also incorporated my experience from creative writing into my writing courses. Following my interdisciplinary and intersectional perspective in my teaching practices, I am currently affiliated faculty in Africana studies; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; medieval, renaissance, and early-modern studies; Latin American and Caribbean studies; and international affairs.

What will you be teaching in the fall? 

In fall 2025, I am teaching SPAN 314: Texts and Contexts: Latin America (post-1900). In this course, I usually explore cisgender and transgender points of view on Latin American and Caribbean writers. This class offers different paths to evaluate the students, through a creative writing assignment or a testimonial assignment, for example, that allow the students to conduct a critical analysis of our class content. In addition, I am offering two sections on one accelerated course in the Spanish language.

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