Andrew K. Bush

Andrew Bush received his PhD in comparative literature from Yale University in 1983 and arrived at Vassar the following fall. Joining the Department of Hispanic Studies as a teacher of Latin American literature, he shifted to teaching primarily Peninsular literature after several years, including service as the director of the Vassar-Wesleyan Program in Spain. He has published articles in both fields and in several periods, including articles on Golden Age Spanish literature, twentieth-century women authors in Spain, and twentieth-century Spanish American literature, and a book on Spanish American poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, The Routes of Modernity. He also served as the editor of the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos for a period of five years, while the journal was being published at Vassar.

Andrew Bush’s training in literary theory has provided the foundation for his work in Hispanic Studies, as well as for his participation as a teacher in various multidisciplinary programs at Vassar, including American Studies, Urban Studies and the College Courses Program. More recently, Andrew Bush was among the faculty group that designed a Jewish Studies Program for the College and served as the program’s first director. He has taught a variety of courses in Jewish Studies, including classes on Jewish textuality, the Holocaust, the history of German-Jewish culture, and seminars on topics in Jewish culture in Europe and the Americas in the period between the two world wars. His publications are now increasingly in the area of Jewish Studies, with special attention to theoretical questions.

Andrew Bush currently divides his teaching time evenly between Jewish Studies and Hispanic Studies, with ongoing research interests in both fields. Although the two areas of study have different histories in Mr. Bush’s work, and have remained largely separate in his professional itinerary, he has begun to develop points of contact between them in his teaching (e.g. a course on Jews, Muslims and Christians of medieval Spain) and his writing, including consideration of the concept of diaspora in Jewish Studies and postcolonial theory.