Ph.D. Cornell University, 1974; Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Spanish; Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Areas of interest: Colonial Spanish American literature and history; manuscript culture and textual transmission in colonial Spanish America; the nineteenth-century origins of Hispanism in the United States.

Adorno’s most recent books are The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative (Yale University Press, 2007) and De Guancane a Macondo: estudios de literatura hispanoamericana (Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2008). She has also recently completed studies of the making and censorship of the manuscripts of Fray Martín de Murúa (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008).

Her earlier works include Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru (1986, 2000), La obra de don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1989, 1992), Guaman Poma and his Illustrated Chronicle from Colonial Peru (2001), and New Studies of the Autograph Manuscript of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (2003). She is the editor of From Oral to Written Expression: Native Andean Chronicles of the Early Colonial Period (1982), Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century (with Kenneth J. Andrien, 1991), The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca (with Patrick C. Pautz, 2003), and the print and digital editions of Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1980, 1987, 2001, 2004, with John V. Murra and Jorge L. Urioste). She introduced a new edition of Irving A. Leonard’s classic Books of the Brave (University of California Press, 1992) as well as its recent reissue in Spanish, Los libros del conquistador, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006).

Adorno’s three-volume study, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez (1999), co-authored with Patrick C. Pautz, received the Dwight L. Smith Book Award from the Western Historical Association (2000), the Best Book Award from the New England Council of Latin American Studies (2000), and the J. Franklin Jameson Award from the American Historical Association (2001).

Rolena Adorno has been the recipient of the Graduate Mentor Award of the Graduate School of Yale University (2003) and a Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award from her alma mater, the University of Iowa (2001). She has held fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities (1986) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1989). She is an Honorary Associate of the Hispanic Society of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.