William Acree

William Acree

Vice Dean of Interdisciplinary Initiatives and Innovation
Co-Director, Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures
Professor of Spanish, American Culture Studies (Affiliate) and Performing Arts (Affiliate)
PhD, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
BA, Berry College
research interests:
  • Cultural History
  • Popular & Material Culture
  • Storytelling & Origin Stories
  • Transdisciplinarity

contact info:

office hours:

  • Mondays, 2:30-4:30pm
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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

Selected Journal Articles

From our podcast:

Hold That Thought Podcast

Good Gaucho Gone Bad: The Creole Drama

William Acree helps us envision and understand the lasting significance "Creole dramas," a dramatic craze that swept Uruguay and Argentina in the 19th century.

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

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


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.

Empire's End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World

Empire's End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World

The fall of the Spanish Empire: that period in the nineteenth century when it lost its colonies in Spanish America and the Philippines. How did it happen? What did the process of the "end of empire" look like? Empire's End considers the nation's imperial legacy beyond this period, all the way up to the present moment. In addition to scrutinizing the political, economic, and social implications of this "end," these chapters emphasize the cultural impact of this process through an analysis of a wide range of representations—literature, literary histories, periodical publications, scientific texts, national symbols, museums, architectural monuments, and tourist routes—that formed the basis of transnational connections and exchange. The book breaks new ground by addressing the ramifications of Spain's imperial project in relation to its former colonies, not only in Spanish America, but also in North Africa and the Philippines, thus generating new insights into the circuits of cultural exchange that link these four geographical areas that are rarely considered together. Empire's End showcases the work of scholars of literature, cultural studies, and history, centering on four interrelated issues crucial to understanding the end of the Spanish empire: the mappings of the Hispanic Atlantic, race, human rights, and the legacies of empire.

The Gaucho Juan Moreira: True Crime in Nineteenth-Century Argentina

The Gaucho Juan Moreira: True Crime in Nineteenth-Century Argentina

Argentinian writer Eduardo Gutiérrez (1851-1889) fashioned his seminal gauchesque novel from the prison records of the real Juan Moreira, a noble outlaw whose life and name became legendary in the Río de la Plata during the late 19th century.

 

John Chasteen's fast-moving, streamlined translation--the first ever into English--captures all of the sweeping romance and knife-wielding excitement of the original. William Acree's introduction and notes situate Juan Moreira in its literary and historical contexts. Numerous illustrations, a map of Moreira’s travels, a glossary of terms, and a select bibliography are all included.