Javier Padilla Rios

Javier Padilla is Assistant Professor of English at Colgate University. His current research project, Decolonial Poetry and the Time of Liberation, considers the role of politically engaged poetry during social revolutions and processes of decolonization. In revolutions taking place in Ireland, Central America, Africa, and the Caribbean, poets like W.B. Yeats and Ernesto Cardenal sought to capture in their poetry the time of liberation—an ‘opportune moment’ which envisions the end of colonialism and imperialism, and the dawn of a decolonized historical consciousness. The book thus probes the poetry and poetics of revolution by analyzing key moments in the history of twentieth-century liberation movements through the theoretical lens of decoloniality and the philosophy of liberation. In addition to Yeats and Cardenal, the book considers the work of poets like Pedro Mir, René Depestre, Roque Dalton, Christopher Okigbo, and Merle Collins, as well as the decolonial theories of thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and Enrique Dussel.

His articles and translations have appeared in Modern Philology, Interventions,  Literary Imagination, Revista Iberoamericana, The Journal of Modern Literature, and Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos.

His teaching specialties include global modernism(s), Latinx Studies, Irish and Latin American Studies, Translation Studies, and 20th-century poetry. Padilla’s research interests include transnationalism, postcolonialism, modernity/coloniality, Media Studies, and Literary Theory.

His first Spanish-language poetry collection — Dodecadencias — was published by Valparaíso in 2023.