Francis Watlington

Francis Watlington is a recent PhD graduate from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese (2015). He completed his BA in English at the University of Puerto Rico where he cultivated an interest in the cultural and hemispheric dialogues between North and South in English-language literature. While completing his graduate studies in Spanish at UT, Francis developed a dissertation project centered on the relationship between male alienation and authorship in the context of late modern Cuban history as seen through a local tradition of existentialist fiction. Francis has previously been awarded a Library of Congress Junior Fellowship, as well as a Research Fellowship, by the University of Miami, to pursue archival work in that school’s Cuban Heritage Collection. Further augmenting the scope of his research, he is currently developing an intercultural framework for assessing the impact of religious ethics and dialogical theology in Spanish Caribbean philosophy and how it could provide a model for a liberationist theory of radical democracy that is strongly grounded in a commitment to human rights in the region.