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A Distinguished and Presidential Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Robert Fitzgerald Reid-Pharr holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before coming to the Graduate Center he was an assistant and associate professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University. In addition, he has been the Edward Said Visiting Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut, the Drue Heinz Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oxford, the Carlisle and Barbara Moore Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oregon, and the Frederic Ives Carpenter Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago. A specialist in African American culture and a prominent scholar in the field of race and sexuality studies, he has published three books and numerous articles in, among other places, American Literature, American Literary History, Callaloo, Afterimage, Small Axe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Women and Performance, Social Text, Transition, Studies in the Novel, The African American Review, and Radical America. His research and writing have been supported by grants from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn.

Reading Federico Garcia Lorca's poetry, especially Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York), against the works of his African American interlocutors, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Bob Kaufmann, Robert Reid-Pharr attempts to rescue Lorca and his oeuvre from what he takes to be a process of stultifying canonization that has turned the martyred poet and playwright into a unlikely Spanish national hero. Alternatively, Reid-Pharr argues that by reading Lorca as a self-conscious participant within Atlantic and indeed African Diasporic aesthetic practices one is able to recapture the sense of radical urgency in Lorca's work, the very urgency that precipitated his murder by Fascists early in Spain's civil war.