- Associate Teaching Professor, Spanish Section Head
- Email: william_stark@uri.edu
- Office Location: Swan 158
Biography
William R. Stark is Associate Teaching Professor of Spanish at the University of Rhode Island. Before joining URI, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Brown University and taught at Trinity College in Hartford and at the University of Connecticut’s Hartford and Storrs campuses.
His scholarly and creative work moves across languages, disciplines, and artistic forms, with particular interests in Latin American and Chicano/Latino cultural production, transcultural performance, visual art, music, and the cultural politics of the U.S.–Mexico border.
Research
Stark’s research and teaching interests include Spanish language acquisition, Latin American literatures and cultures, Chicano/Latino cultural production, and transcultural performance art in the United States since the 1980s. His scholarship focuses particularly on the ways performance, visual culture, the body, and artistic intervention interrogate borders, national identity, colonial histories, and the representation of cultural difference.
His book, Artificial Savages in a Transcultural Landscape: Performance Art, Political Intention, and the Aesthetic Projects of Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Coco Fusco, Violeta Luna, and Roberto Sifuentes, was published by Routledge in 2026 as part of the Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies series. The book examines performance as a site of embodied critique and transcultural negotiation through the work of Gómez-Peña, Fusco, Luna, Sifuentes, and La Pocha Nostra, while also exposing the dire realities of white nationalist agendas in a global community.
Stark is also active as a visual artist. His recent work includes painting and mixed-media pieces exploring form, materiality, memory, cultural inheritance, and the relationship between abstraction and the body. He serves on the board of Rhode Island Latino Arts and is active in the Newport, Rhode Island, arts community, most recently as a contributing artist in an exhibition at the Newport Art Museum. His involvement in the arts also extends to music. During the mid-1990s, while living in the Seattle area, Stark performed and recorded as a musician in a band, part of a longer engagement with songwriting and music that continues alongside his scholarly and visual-art practice.
He was also a co-founder of The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal, an online peer-reviewed journal established at the University of Connecticut.
Education
PhD University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT
MA University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI
BA Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA
Selected Publications
Artificial Savages in a Transcultural Landscape: Performance Art, Political Intention, and the Aesthetic Projects of Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Coco Fusco, Violeta Luna, and Roberto Sifuentes. Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies. Routledge, 2026.
“Violeta Luna: Representaciones de la identidad indígena: la mujer del maíz––la llorona cibernética.” Ed. Vilma Navarro-Daniels. Contextos: Estudios de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales, no. 45, 2020.
“Mapping and Performing Mexicana (Indigenous) Identities: Violeta Luna and the Woman of Maize.” Ed. Elizabeth Martínez. The Modern Language Association Options for Teaching Series.
“The Pearl Handled Revolver: Mary’s Ransom.” Border-Lines: Journal of the Latino Research Center at the University of Nevada, Reno, 2016, pp. 135–147.
“Two Fleeting Glimpses of Capitalism and Violence.” Border-Lines: Journal of the Latino Research Center at the University of Nevada, Reno, 2015, pp. 121–140.