Jean Franco (March 31, 1924 – December 14, 2022) was a British-born American academic and literary critic known for her pioneering work on Latin American literature.^[1] Educated at Manchester and London, she taught at London, Essex (where she was the university's first professor of Latin American literature),^[2] and Stanford, and was latterly professor emerita at Columbia University.

Research

Jean Franco's research was wide-ranging and voluminous. She was among the first English-speaking Latin Americanists to write seriously about Latin American literature. She particularly focused on women and women's writing and was a pioneer of Latin American cultural studies.^[3]

Personal life and death

Franco died on December 14, 2022, at the age of 98.^[1][4][5]

Awards

• In 1992 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Essex.^[6]
• In 1996 she won a PEN award for lifetime contribution to the dissemination of Latin American literature in English.^[7]
• In 2000 the Latin American Studies Association awarded her the Kalman Silvert Award for her contributions to Latin American Studies.^[8]
• In 2002 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Manchester.
• Her book The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City was awarded the Bolton-Johnson Prize by the Conference of Latin American Historians for the best work in English on the History of Latin America published in 2003.

Selected publications

• The Modern Culture of Latin America (1967)
• An Introduction to Latin American Literature (1969)
• Spanish American Literature Since Independence (1973)
• César Vallejo. The Dialectics of Poetry and Silence (1976)
• Plotting Women. Gender and Representation in Mexico (1989)
• Marcar diferencias, cruzar fronteras: ensayos (1996)
• Critical Passions: Selected Essays, edited by Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman (1999)
• The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (2002)
• Cruel Modernity (2013)