Modern Languages
Photo of Dr. Óscar Iván Useche
Óscar Iván Useche
Associate Professor of Modern Languages
Dr. Useche holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, and advanced degrees in Latin American and peninsular literatures and cultures. His teaching and research interests include the influence of science, technology and industry on Spanish cultural production, and the relations between dynamics of social, political, and economic transformation and the construction of national identity in Spain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Professor Useche has taught courses on different periods and problems related to the Hispanic world, as well as a wide variety of Spanish language classes. His book, Founders of the Future: The Science and Industry of Spanish Modernization (Bucknell UP, 2022), is an exploration of industrialization as a repertoire of concepts, images, and paradigms that writers, scientists, educators, and politicians utilized to shape their visions of the national problems at the turn of the twentieth century.
Department
Degrees
Ph.D., M.Phil., Columbia University
M.A., Indiana University, Bloomington
M.A., B.S., Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá
Teaching
Senior Seminar in Hispanic Studies:
Ibero-American Rock Music and the Politics of Popular Culture in the Hispanic World, 1970-2000.
Topics in Hispanic Literature & Culture:
Contemporary Short Fiction and Film.
Modernization and its Discontents in 19th- and 20th-Century Spanish Cultural Production.
Televised (Hi)Stories: Remembering and Re-Writing the Past in Spanish Media.
Narco-Narratives: The Aesthetics of Violence and Illegality in the Hispanic World.
Survey of Spanish Literature
Spanish Conversation and Composition
Professional Experience
Dr. Useche joined Ursinus after completing his Ph.D in Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, where he taught Spanish language and culture for more than six years. Previously, Professor Useche was an Associate Instructor of Spanish at Indiana University in Bloomington.
Research Interests
- Spanish cultural production of the 19th and 20th centuries
- Science and literature
- Technology and cultural production
- Mathematics and literature
Recent Work
Book:
Founders of the Future: The Science and Industry of Spanish Modernization. Bucknell University Press, 2022.
Chapters, Articles and Reviews:
“A Story of Failed Conversion: The Impossible Refashioning of Tradition in Galdós’s Rosalía.” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, vol. 74, no. 4, 2020, pp. 219-33.
Presentations in Conferences:
“Modernization’s Multiple Stops: Contradictory Negotiations of Progress in Ortega Munilla’s Fiction.” Remodeling Rural Spain: Infrastructural Development and National Identity. The MLA’s 137th Annual Convention. Washington, DC, January 2022.