Chris Kelly
Assistant Professor
English Literature
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Chris Cañete Rodriguez Kelly is Assistant Professor of English at Swarthmore College. As a literary critic, their work focuses on social relations of labor and aesthetic production. They received their Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2024 and specialize in twentieth-century Southeast Asian and Asian-diasporic literatures, with research and teaching interests in Philippine Tagalog and Anglophone literature and translation, Latinx studies, critical indigenous studies, as well as American and Asian American Studies. Their first book project, Mutually Unintelligible: Language, Labor, and the Impossibility of Translation in the Making of the Philippine Novel, argues that Philippine novels across languages represent colonial history through linguistic diversity by formally situating secondary languages as reproductive of the primary language of the text, transposing the multilingual disaggregation of the archipelago into an aesthetic strategy for rethinking geographical and cultural difference. Prof. Kelly’s work has appeared in Hispanic Issues, The Mekong Review, CNN Philippines, ASAP/Journal, and PMLA. From 2021-2023 they were affiliated with the University of the Philippines-Diliman and Ateneo de Manila University as a Fulbright-Hays fellow, and from 2024-2026 they were a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University.
