William Acree

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

contact info:

office hours:

  • Thursday: 10:00AM-12:00PM
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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

Empire's End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World

Empire's End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World

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

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