Zachary Rockwell Ludington

B.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2007)
M.A. University of Virginia (2009)
Ph.D. University of Virginia (2014)

Bio:

Zachary Rockwell Ludington is Associate Professor of Spanish at UMaine. He also serves as the Director of the McGillicuddy Humanities Center. Dr. Ludington earned graduate degrees (MA and PhD) in Hispanic Literatures at the University of Virginia. He did his undergraduate work (BA), in Romance Languages and Journalism and Mass Communication, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While a student at Chapel Hill, he had the chance to spend a semester at the University of Seville, in Spain. Before arriving at UMaine in the fall of 2017, Dr. Ludington taught at Emory University, in Atlanta, and the University of the Côte d’Azur, in France.

Ludington’s research focuses on twentieth-century avant-garde poetry in Iberia. In his current book project, Avant-Garde Arcadia: Pastoral in Modern Iberian Poetry, he studies a bucolic strain in avant-garde poetry in Castilian, Portuguese, French, and Catalan. He has published scholarly articles on modern and contemporary poetry in journals like Dada/Surrealism, The International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, the Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, and Romance Notes. He also translates contemporary Spanish poetry into English. His version of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Pixel Flesh came out with Cardboard House Press in 2020.

Scholarly interests:

Poetry, the historical avant-gardes, literary theory, translation.

Why I teach in Honors:

I’m excited to help students get more out of complex texts than they might glean on first reading. I think the Honors curriculum, which values reflection and the sustained practice of critical reading, is a great way to stimulate conversations on important texts that can be revelatory and unexpected. Of course, the corollary to those conversations is the revelation of something unexpected in students’ thinking, even in their ideas about who they are and what they can do.