Instructor

Antonio Hernández-Matos holds a PhD in History in Puerto Rico and the Hispanic Caribbean with a minor in modern United States from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. He did a master's degree in American history at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and his bachelor in secondary education with a concentration in history from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. His dissertation, “Estas cosas parecen triviales; pero son de más importancia de lo que se cree:” Fashion, Gender, and Modernity in Puerto Rican Periodicals, 1900-1930, examines how Puerto Ricans considered conceptions of modernity – and its discontents – through fashion (as dress and behavior) texts and images. It shows how they, participating of “transnational imagined interpretive communities,” appropriated transnational discourses on fashionability and modernity to construct modern gendered subjectivities, while, at the same time, keeping a tense relationship with the unfolding processes of a paradoxical and bewildering “colonial modernity.” It demonstrates that, in Puerto Rican society, one can discern between the “modern woman” and the “chica moderna,” and how people from across the social spectrum expressed their ambivalence, their fascination and fears, regarding them. It also examines conceptions of masculinity and show how Puerto Ricans distinguished between an accepted, normal/normalizing “hombres sí’ and a negative, deviant modern masculinity – “hombres nó.” He is the author of “Fashion and Modernity in Puerto Rico, 1920–1930,” “On the Complex Memory of a Pionero: A Cultural Analysis of Joaquín Colón’s Memoirs,” ““Hombres sí/Hombres nó:” Fashioning Masculinity in Early 20th Century Puerto Rico,” and “Constructing a Modern, Fashionable, and Consuming Subject: Men, Masculinity, and Fashion in Early 20th Century Puerto Rico” (forthcoming). He co-authored the textbook Estados Unidos de América: trayectoria de una nación (2010 and 2015). Has published book reviews in the journal European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (University of Amsterdam), and H-DIPLO (H-NET network) and has presented papers at universities in the United States and Puerto Rico. His research interests revolve around the construction of subjectivities/representations in a consumer society: the relationship among fashion, modernity, gender, sexuality, and consumption; and the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States, its relations with consumer society, and the links between history and memory in its historiography.