Vera Kutzinski

Vera M. Kutzinski is an American academic and researcher who was born in Cuxhaven, Germany, in 1956. Since 2004, she has been the Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. Kutzinski also directs the Alexander von Humboldt in English (HiE) project, a collaboration between Vanderbilt and the Institute of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Potsdam, Germany.

Kutzinski’s work focuses on African American and Afro-Diasporic literatures in hemispheric and transatlantic contexts; on translation and translation studies; and on the history of knowledge production. Her books include Against the American Grain: Myth and History in William Carlos Williams, Jay Wright, and Nicolás Guillén, Sugar's Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism, and The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas. Langston Hughes in Context, an essay collection Kutzinski co-edited with Anthony Reed, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.