Gregory G. Helmick

Gregory Helmick works on configurations of nationhood, ethnicity, and cultural contact, between Cuban, Puerto Rican, and the U.S. communities—particularly African American and non-Spanish-speaking Caribbean communities—in textual production in Spanish and English. In Cuban and Puerto Rican literature, such contact is developed thematically in historical fiction and essays that complicate archival configurations of nationhood and exile with the "noise" of documentary flows between Caribbean communities and U.S. sites of multistoried colonization. Such sites include Jacksonville, St. Augustine, Fernandina, and Tallahassee, Florida. 

When beginning to examine such topics in his first monograph, Archival Dissonance in the Cuban Post-Exile Novel (2016), Dr. Helmick was one of the first scholars to work on developing a theoretical framework of post-exile. During the past few years, international scholars have applied this framework to approach such topics as Mexico in literary (post)exile; post-exilic memory in the poetics of Keorapetse Kgositsile; concepts of exterritoriality and postexile in Siegfried Kracauer; post-war German literature and post-exile; Gao Xingjian’s post-exilic plays; and post-exile, queer theory, and speculative fiction, to cite some of the topics of recent research identified by the Jarbuch Exilforschung editors Bettina Banasch and Katya Sarkowsky.    

Helmick earned his doctorate from The University of Texas at Austin. He has enjoyed the privilege and good fortune of teaching Spanish, Hispanic literatures, U.S. Hispanic cultures, and Caribbean studies, at UNF since 2010.

His current book project focuses on documenting shared literary and historical production between Cuba and northeast Florida during the first half of the twentieth century, in the face of erasures incurred during Plattist, Jim Crow, Fordist and Batista-era social regimes.