Shields Publishes New Article

Dr. Tom Shields, Associate Professor Emeritus, has recently published the article “From Columbus to Corridos: Thirty-Plus Years of Bringing Hispanic and Latinx Writing to the Early American Literature Classroom,” in the most recent edition of Resources for American Literary Study, 45.2 (2023): 339-51.  The article appeared in the summer of 2025, despite being dated 2023.

The article is part of a forum on “Teaching Early Latinx Literature” and grew out of a session on that topic at the 2024 American Literature Association conference. Tom discusses how he integrated Hispanic American and Latinx texts throughout the semester in ENGL 3020, “History of American Literature to 1900,” using them as a touchstone to illustrate the various traditions in American literature alongside more customarily taught Anglo-American writings. He also discusses how in a class designed for English majors these texts could be usefully examined from several different academic perspectives with students having a variety of focuses to their studies—creative writing, cultural studies, English education, folklore, linguistics, literature, rhetoric and composition, and technical and professional communications.