Rubén Gallo received his B.A. in English from Yale University, and his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. He taught at Cornell and the University of Toronto before coming to Princeton in 2002.
At Princeton, he teaches courses on Freud, the avant-garde, and other aspects of twentieth-century culture. He has directed the Program in Latin American Studies since 2008.
Gallo’s Mexican Modernity is a study of the Mexican avant-garde’s fascination with machines. Gallo has taught several courses on this topic at Princeton, and in 2003 he organized an international conference on “Radio and the Sound of Modernity,” one of the topics explored in the book.
His most recent publication, Freud’s Mexico, explores the quirky ways in which Mexican writers and artists, from Octavio Paz to Remedios Varo, read psychoanalytic texts — and also includes a discussion on Freud’s ideas about Mexico.
In 2009, Gallo spent a semester in Vienna as the Fulbright-Freud Scholar of Psychoanalysis. He is on the board of the Freud Museum in Vienna, and has lectured on Freud at the Freud House in London.
He is now working on a book on Proust’s Latin Americans — the first study of Marcel Proust’s friendships and love affairs with Latin Americans.
