William Acree

Associate Vice Dean of Graduate Education
Professor of Spanish, American Culture Studies (Affiliate) and Performing Arts (Affiliate)
Co-Director, Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures

PhD, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
BA, Berry College

research interests:

Cultural History
Popular & Material Culture
Global Street Cultures
Public Space & State Formation
Afro-Latin America
Public Humanities

View All People

contact info:

Email: acree@wustl.edu
Phone: 314-935-5145
Office: Ridgley 313

office hours:

Thursday: 10:00AM-12:00PM

Get Directions

mailing address:

Washington University
MSC 1077-146-310
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

William Acree is a transdisciplinary scholar whose research and teaching explore the cultural history of Latin America, the enduring impacts of everyday experiences, and the ways cultural goods and activities inflect public life, politics, and identities.

Acree’s work has engaged the cultural history of reading, delved into the extravagant, playful, and always surprising world of popular performance, studied the almost forgotten lives of Afro-Latin American writers and thinkers, and followed the emergence of modern popular culture in Latin America. Linking all these areas is Acree’s persistent interest in the everyday and lasting impact of what are often ephemeral cultural activities and products. He began developing this line of research first in Everyday Reading: Print Culture and Collective Identity in the Río de la Plata (1780-1910) (Vanderbilt University Press; Argentine edition with Prometeo Editorial), which received the Southern Cone Studies Section 2013 Humanities Book Award of the Latin American Studies Association.

More recently, this focus on everyday life took him to the circus, the world of extravagant showmen & women, and the stages of popular theater. In performance venues and and in daily interactions beyond, theater-goers explored relationships of race, ethnicity, migration, and class. The tensions playing out on stage, and between rural life and this pivotal moment of modernization are at the heart of Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina & Uruguay (University of New Mexico Press Diálogo Series; Argentine edition with Prometeo Editorial), winner of the 2020 Best Book award from the Latin American Studies Association Nineteenth Century section.

Acree is currently working on a collaborative project on the Stories that Win—political origin stories, stories of community and national beginnings, heroic tales and product launches that people tell and retell.

He received his BA from Berry College and his PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, a J. William Fulbright Scholar award, a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship, and grants from the Mellon and Tinker Foundations.

Collaborative Work

Mapping Street Cultures in Modern Latin(x) America
First English translation of Eduardo Gutiérrez’s page-turner The Gaucho Juan Moreira: True Crime in Nineteenth-Century Argentina, translated by John Chasteen (Hackett, 2014)
Co-edited Empire’s End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World, with Akiko Tsuchiya (Vanderbilt University Press, 2016)
Co-edited Jacinto Ventura de Molina: los caminos de la escritura negra en el Río de la Plata, with Alex Borucki (2nd rev. ed. Iberoamericana / Vervuert, 2010)
Co-edited Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America: Re-rooted Cultures, Identities, and Nations , with Juan Carlos González Espitia (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009)

Selected Journal Articles

On the Heels of Juan Moreira: Lessons for the Cultural History of Reading” (PMLA)
“Divisas and Deberes: Women and the Symbolic Economy of War Rhetoric in the Río de la Plata, 1810-1910” (Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies)
“The Creole Circus and Popular Entertainment in 19th-Century Argentina and Uruguay,” in the (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History)
“Hemispheric Travelers on the Rioplatense Stage” (Latin American Theatre Review)
“ Jacinto Ventura de Molina: A Black Letrado in a White World of Letters, 1766-1841” (Latin American Research Review)
“Luis Pérez, A Man of His Word in 1830s Buenos Aires and the Case for Popular Literature” (Bulletin of Spanish Studies)
"El primer negro de el mundo en la carrera de las letras’: Raza, revolución y el vocero de la ‘república nigro-literaria’ en el Río de la Plata” (Afro-Hispanic Review)

Good Gaucho Gone Bad: The Creole Drama

In the 1880s, a new kind of performance became the craze in Argentina and Uruguay. These wild "Creole dramas" glorified country life and the occasionally violent exploits of gauchos*, or Argentinian cowboys. In addition to being hugely fun to watch, the stories appealed to audiences experiencing rapid modernization and waves of immigration.

in the news:

11.16.22

Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures announces first round of funded projects

5.10.22

Hayes and Acree appointed to leadership roles in support of graduate education

3.2.22

Acree appointed Dean's Fellow for Graduate Education Initiatives

6.8.21

Prof. Acree featured on podcast about his book, Staging Frontiers: the making of modern popular culture in Argentina and Uruguay

Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina & Uruguay

By William Acree

Swashbuckling tales of valiant gauchos roaming Argentina and Uruguay were nineteenth-century bestsellers. But when these stories jumped from the page to the circus stage and beyond, their cultural, economic, and political influence revolutionized popular culture and daily life. In this engaging book, William Acree delivers a deep history of Latin American popular entertainment that culminates in a rich exploration of circus culture and dramas that celebrated the countryside. Among the most dominant urban and rural attractions on the eve of the twentieth century, these performances were central to how Argentines, Uruguayans, and immigrants came together across lines of social class, ethnic identity, and race as demographic and economic transformations reshaped everyday experience. Acree offers a revealing portrait of itinerant circus performers and the ways they rubbed shoulders with ranch hands, urban workers, and the upper classes to cheer their heroes and jeer their villains. Ultimately, “Staging Frontiers” tells the story of the surprising and enduring impact leisure and entertainment had on the increasingly expansive marketplace of culture.

University of New Mexico Press

Everyday Reading: Print Culture and Collective Identity in the Rio de la Plata, 1780-1910

By William Acree

Starting in the late nineteenth century, the region of South America known as the Rio de la Plata (containing modern-day Uruguay and Argentina) boasted the highest literacy rates in Latin America. In Everyday Reading, William Acree explores the history, events, and culture that gave rise to the region's remarkable progress. With a specific focus on its print culture, in the form of newspapers, political advertisements and documents, schoolbooks, and even stamps and currency, Acree creates a portrait of a literary culture that permeated every aspect of life.

Vanderbilt University Press