William Acree

Vice Dean of Interdisciplinary Initiatives and Innovation
Co-Director, Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures
Professor of Spanish, American Culture Studies (Affiliate) and Performing Arts (Affiliate)

PhD, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
BA, Berry College

research interests:

Cultural History
Popular & Material Culture
Storytelling & Origin Stories
Transdisciplinarity

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contact info:

Email: acree@wustl.edu
Phone: 314-935-5145
Office: Ridgley 313

office hours:

Mondays, 2:30-4:30pm

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mailing address:

Washington University
MSC 1077-146-310
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

William Acree is a transdisciplinary scholar whose research and teaching explore the cultural history of Latin America, 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 cultural history of reading, delved into the extravagant, playful, and always surprising world of popular performance, studied the almost forgotten lives of Afro-Latin American writers and thinkers, and followed the emergence of modern popular culture in Latin America. Linking all these areas is Acree’s persistent interest in the everyday and lasting impact of what are often ephemeral cultural activities and products. He began developing this line of research first in Everyday Reading: Print Culture and Collective Identity in the Río de la Plata (1780-1910) (Vanderbilt University Press; Argentine edition with Prometeo Editorial), which received the Southern Cone Studies Section 2013 Humanities Book Award of the Latin American Studies Association.

More recently, this focus on everyday life took him to the circus, the world of extravagant showmen & women, and the stages of popular theater. In performance venues and and in daily interactions beyond, theater-goers explored relationships of race, ethnicity, migration, and class. The tensions playing out on stage, and between rural life and this pivotal moment of modernization are at the heart of Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina & Uruguay (University of New Mexico Press Diálogo Series; Argentine edition with Prometeo Editorial), winner of the 2020 Best Book award from the Latin American Studies Association Nineteenth Century section.

Acree is currently working on a collaborative project on the Stories that Win—political origin stories, stories of community and national beginnings, heroic tales and product launches that people tell and retell.

He received his BA from Berry College and his PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, a J. William Fulbright Scholar award, a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship, and grants from the Mellon and Tinker Foundations.

Collaborative Work

Mapping Street Cultures in Modern Latin(x) America
First English translation of Eduardo Gutiérrez’s page-turner The Gaucho Juan Moreira: True Crime in Nineteenth-Century Argentina, translated by John Chasteen (Hackett, 2014)
Co-edited Empire’s End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World, with Akiko Tsuchiya (Vanderbilt University Press, 2016)
Co-edited Jacinto Ventura de Molina: los caminos de la escritura negra en el Río de la Plata, with Alex Borucki (2nd rev. ed. Iberoamericana / Vervuert, 2010)
Co-edited Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America: Re-rooted Cultures, Identities, and Nations , with Juan Carlos González Espitia (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009)

Selected Journal Articles

On the Heels of Juan Moreira: Lessons for the Cultural History of Reading” (PMLA)
“Divisas and Deberes: Women and the Symbolic Economy of War Rhetoric in the Río de la Plata, 1810-1910” (Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies)
“The Creole Circus and Popular Entertainment in 19th-Century Argentina and Uruguay,” in the (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History)
“Hemispheric Travelers on the Rioplatense Stage” (Latin American Theatre Review)
“ Jacinto Ventura de Molina: A Black Letrado in a White World of Letters, 1766-1841” (Latin American Research Review)
“Luis Pérez, A Man of His Word in 1830s Buenos Aires and the Case for Popular Literature” (Bulletin of Spanish Studies)
"El primer negro de el mundo en la carrera de las letras’: Raza, revolución y el vocero de la ‘república nigro-literaria’ en el Río de la Plata” (Afro-Hispanic Review)

Everyday Reading

By William Acree

Starting in the late nineteenth century, the region of South America known as the Rio de la Plata (containing modern-day Uruguay and Argentina) boasted the highest literacy rates in Latin America. In Everyday Reading, William Acree explores the history, events, and culture that gave rise to the region's remarkable progress. With a specific focus on its print culture, in the form of newspapers, political advertisements and documents, schoolbooks, and even stamps and currency, Acree creates a portrait of a literary culture that permeated every aspect of life.

Everyday Reading argues that the introduction of the printing press into the Rio de la Plata in the 1780s hastened the collapse of Spanish imperial control and played a major role in the transition to independence some thirty years later. After independence, print culture nurtured a new identity and helped sustain the region through the tumult of civil war in the mid-1800s. Acree concludes by examining the role of reading in formal education, which had grown exponentially by the early twentieth century as schoolchildren were taught to fulfill traditional roles in society.

Vanderbilt University Press

Los caminos de la escritura negra en el rio de la plata

By William Acree

Selección de sus manuscritos de Jacinto Ventura de Molina (1766-1841), figura excepcional para la historia y la literatura de América Latina. Negro libre y letrado, Molina vivió en Rio Grande (Brasil), Buenos Aires y Montevideo. Sus escritos dan testimonio sobre una de las épocas más apasionantes de Iberoamérica: el final del régimen colonial, las guerras de independencia y el surgimiento de las nuevas repúblicas.

Iberoamericana Vervuert