Patricia Felisa Barbeito (PhD, Comparative Literature, Harvard University) is Professor of American Literatures. She teaches courses on race and ethnicity in American literature; the African American literary tradition; captivity and prison narratives; magical realism; the Latin American novel; and noir fiction and film.

Currently, her research focuses on African-American literature and culture of 1940s-1960s, in particular the protest literature of the period. Based on this research, she is working on a book about African-American author Chester Himes titled, One Jump Ahead of Disaster: The Politics of Race, Interracial Sex, and Literary Style in Chester Himes’s Writing.

She is also a translator of contemporary Greek fiction and poetry. Her translations include Their Smell Makes Me Want to Cry by Menis Koumandareas (co-translated with Vangelis Calotychos; Birmingham University Press, 2004), and, most recently, Elias Maglinis’s The Interrogation (Birmingham University Press, 2013) for which she was awarded the 2013 MGSA Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize.