Rolena Adorno

Rolena Adorno is the Sterling Professor Emerita of Spanish. She is the seventh recipient of the Modern Language Association’s Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement, presented every three years since 1996, and is the only recipient, to date, from the Spanish-language literatures. Professor Adorno has been the chair of the Countries and Cultures of the South at the U.S. Library of Congress, the recipient of the Premio Nacional “Enrique Anderson Imbert” from the Asociación Norteamericana de la Lengua Española, and the Phi Beta Kappa–Frank M. Updike Memorial Scholar of the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program. In 2001 she received a Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award from her alma mater, the University of Iowa, and in 2003 she was a recipient of Yale’s Graduate Mentor Award in the Humanities. In 2009 President Barack Obama appointed her to the National Council on the Humanities, on which she served for ten years.

Professor Adorno has devoted herself to the study of the literary and intellectual history of Spanish America from the time of Columbus to nineteenth-century Latin American independence from Spain. Her prize-winning books in this field are The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative, which was awarded the MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, and the three-volume study, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, co-authored with Patrick C. Pautz, which received prizes from the American Historical Association, the Western History Association, and the New England Council of Latin American Studies. 

Writing in Spanish as well as English, Professor Adorno is the author of De Guancane a Macondo: Estudios de literatura hispanoamericana and Cronista y príncipe: La obra de don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. Her Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru and Guaman Poma and his Illustrated Chronicle from Colonial Peru have appeared in Spanish. Her Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction has been published in Spanish under the title Breve historia de la literatura latinoamericana colonial y moderna, an edition which she co-authored with Roberto González Echevarría.

With a long history of interdisciplinary collaboration in the humanities, Professor Adorno is the co-editor of Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century with Kenneth J. Andrien; The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca, with Patrick C. Pautz; Unlocking the Doors to the Worlds of Guaman Poma and His Nueva corónica with Ivan Boserup; and print editions of Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno with John V. Murra and Jorge L. Urioste. The digital edition of Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, based on the work by Murra, Urioste, and Professor Adorno, and prepared with the collaboration of Ivan Boserup and his Royal Library colleagues, is online on the website of the Royal Library of Denmark, Copenhagen.

Born and raised on a farm in Iowa, Professor Adorno (née Klahn) attended a one-room public country school. She graduated from the University of Iowa in 1964 and earned her Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1974. She has held tenured faculty positions at Syracuse University, the Ohio State University, the University of Michigan, and Princeton University, before coming to Yale in 1996; after twenty-five years on the Yale faculty, she retired in 2021.

For her work in interdisciplinary Latin American studies, she has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and she holds an honorary professorship at La Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima, Peru. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.