Akiko​ Tsuchiya​

Akiko​ Tsuchiya​

Professor Emerita of Spanish
PhD, Cornell University
research interests:
  • Nineteenth-century Iberian literatures and cultures 
  • Spanish realism and naturalism 
  • Women, gender & sexuality studies 
  • Spanish women’s transnational literary and cultural networks 
  • Slavery and antislavery in the Hispanic world 
  • Postcolonial studies 
  • Racist/colonial monuments and public memory 

Professor Tsuchiya’s areas of specialization include modern Spanish literature and culture with a focus on gender studies.

She is the author of a book on the nineteenth-century Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós and has published extensively on nineteenth-and twentieth-century Iberian literatures and cultures. Her research and teaching interests include the realist novel, women’s and gender studies, nineteenth-century women’s transnational literary and cultural networks, race and colonialism, slavery and antislavery, in the Hispanic world. Most recently, she has become engaged in public debates generated around monuments related to colonialism and slavery in the Iberian world. 

Tsuchiya’s books include, Marginal Subjects: Gender and Deviance in Fin-de-siècle Spain (University of Toronto P, 2011), Empire’s End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World (Vanderbilt UP, 2016), Unsettling Colonialism: Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-Century Global Hispanic World (co-edited with N. Michelle Murray, SUNY Press, 2019), and Cultural Legacies of Slavery in Modern Spain (co-edited with Aurélie Vialette, SUNY Press 2025). She is currently working on another book-length study, tentatively titled: Spanish Women in the Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Movement: Transnational Networks and Exchanges.

Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities, Washington University’s Center for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship (Spring 2007 & Fall 2019), CRE2 Faculty Fellowship (Spring 2023), and Summer Faculty Research Grants.

She has delivered over 50 conference papers and invited lectures in the US and abroad, as well as collaborating in research groups with scholars at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC, Madrid) and the University of Barcelona. In summers of 2019 and 2023, she was a visiting scholar at ADHUC: Research Center for Theory, Gender, Sexuality at the University of Barcelona. Twice she received recognition from the Graduate Student Senate for her contributions to graduate education with the Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award (2017) and the Certificate of Special Recognition for Excellence in Mentoring (2007).

Tsuchiya was co-editor of the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos for 12 years and serves on the editorial board of several other peer-reviewed journals and scholarly monograph series. She was President of the International Association of Galdós Scholars (2015-17) and served on the Modern Language Association’s Publication Committee and the Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee.

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Cultural Legacies of Slavery in Modern Spain

Cultural Legacies of Slavery in Modern Spain

By Akiko Tsuchiya

The first book-length study to address the impact of the legacies of slavery on Spanish cultural representations and institutions.

This groundbreaking volume explores how culture produced in Spain, from the nineteenth century to the present, both reflects and shapes ways of understanding the history and heritage of a nation sustained by colonialism and slavery. Akiko Tsuchiya and Aurélie Vialette bring together an outstanding group of scholars, artists, cultural producers, and activists in a range of fields-from history to literary studies, anthropology to journalism, and flamenco to film. Drawing on interdisciplinary and comparative methodologies, contributors address the legacies of slavery in the archive; in cultural memory sites; and in literature, music, and visual arts. How, they ask, do different cultural forms and institutions represent and reckon with this past and push for justice in the face of persistent racial discrimination? In its focus on collective memory and the cultural afterlives of slavery and antislavery, Cultural Legacies of Slavery in Modern Spain will appeal not only to Iberian and Latin American specialists but also readers across Afro-Hispanic, postcolonial, transatlantic, and critical race studies.

Empire's End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World

Edited By Akiko​ Tsuchiya​

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.