Esther Whitfield's current research focuses on representations of the Guantánamo naval base in art, literature and law. She has also worked extensively on Cuban culture of the post-Soviet period and on Welsh writing in the Americas. 

Esther Whitfield's book, A New No-Man’s Land: Writing and Art at Guantánamo, Cuba, was published in 2024 with the University of Pittsburgh Press ("Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas" Series).  There she proposes reading the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo and the surrounding areas of Eastern Cuba as a borderland region that shares a natural environment, a marking of human lives by isolation, and a body of literature and art privileging survival over political hostility.  The project draws on an archive of poetry, art and memoirs by detainees and military personnel at the base and by Cubans nearby, and scholarship in Comparative Literature, Caribbean Studies, History and Law, to trace relationships between literature and other forms of representation, and between this isolated corner of Cuba and the rest of the world.

Her earlier book, Cuban Currency: The Dollar and 'Special Period' Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), explores how the emergence of export markets for Cuban culture is inscribed in contemporary fiction. Based on extensive interviews and archival research in Havana, it takes an integrated approach to the cultural, economic and social changes that have taken place there since the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, from which Cuba derived most of its economic support. It argues that, over the past decade, writers have both challenged and profited from new transnational markets for their work, in a move whose literary and ideological implications are far-reaching.

Whitfield is also co-editor, with Anke Birkenmaier, of Havana Beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings After 1989 (Duke University Press, 2011), a collection of essays on post-1989 Havana; and, with Jacqueline Loss, of an anthology of Cuban short fiction in translation, New Short Fiction from Cuba (Northwestern University Press, 2007). She wrote a critical introduction to Antonio José Ponte's Un arte de hacer ruinas (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005) and has published a number of journal articles and book chapters on contemporary Latin American fiction and Welsh diasporic literature.

 

Wilbur Marvin Visiting Scholar of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard University, 2020-21 (selected)

Faculty Fellowship, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University, 2020-21

National Endowment for the Humanities "Dialogues on the Experience of War" Public Humanities Grant, 2017-2020

Cogut Fellowship in the Humanities, Brown University Fall 2009

Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship, Brown University, 2006-07

Latin American Studies Association
Modern Language Association
American Comparative Literature Association

Comparative Literature 51: Caribbean Re-writes.
Comparative Literature 51: Che Guevara, the Man and the Myths.
Comparative Literature 81 (with Prof. Stephanie Merrim): The Colonial and Postcolonial Marvelous.
Comparative Literature 81: Confession, Autobiography, Testimony.
Comparative Literature 142: Tales of Two Cities: Havana-Miami, San-Juan-New York.
Comparative Literature 181: Reading Revolution: Representations of Cuba.
Comparative Literature 181: Latin American Literature in Dialogue with France.
Comparative Literature 181: War, Anti-War, Postwar: Culture and Contestation in the Americas.
Comparative Literature 282: Latin America and Theory.
Comparative Literature 282 (with Prof. Adrián López-Denis): Culture and Politics in Contemporary Cuba.
Humanities 1970: Literature and the Arts in Today's Cuba.