Director's Corner

Alexandra Wettlaufer, Director
Professor, French and Italian

On sabbatical for the 2022-23 academic year

Professor Alexandra Wettlaufer was educated at Princeton University (B.A., Comparative Literature), Columbia University (M.A., French; Ph.D. French/Comparative Literature). She has also been a Research Fellow at the Reid Hall Graduate Research Institute in Paris. She is currently a faculty affiliate of the Center for Women's and Gender Studies as has been a Trice Professor in Plan II.

After serving as the Plan II Associate Director since 2005, Dr. Alexandra K. Wettlaufer became Director of Plan II in 2017. She is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature, specializing in 19th-century literature, visual arts, culture, and gender studies. A recipient of a 2014-15 Guggenheim Fellowship, Dr. Wettlaufer is currently working on a book project entitled "Reading George: Sand, Eliot and the Novel in France and Britain, 1830-1900." She is the author of three previous books: Pen vs Paintbrush: Girodet, Balzac and the Myth of Pygmalion in Post-Revolutionary France (2001), In the Mind's Eye: The Visual Impulse in Diderot, Baudelaire and Ruskin (2003), and Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800-1860 (2011).  She has published numerous articles on Balzac, Sand, Baudelaire, Zola, Manet, Ruskin, Turner, Berlioz, Grandville, and Flora Tristan; her article "She is Me: Tristan, Gauguin, and the Dialectics of Colonial Identity" (Romanic Review,2007) was awarded the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Essay Prize, Honorable Mention.  

Dr. Wettlaufer has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, ACLS, Bourse Marandon, the Clark Art Institute, and the National Humanities Center.  Her teaching awards include a President's Associates' Teaching Award, the Blunk Memorial Professorship in Teaching and Advising, a Raymond Dickson Centennial Endowed Teaching Award, a Liberal Arts Council Teaching Award, and University Coop Award for Undergraduate Thesis Advising.  She is the Co-Editor of Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal and serves on the Editorial Boards of European Romantic Review, Nineteenth-Century Studies, George Sand Studies, and Dix-Neuf. Dr. Wettlaufer has also served on the Advisory Boards of the American Comparative Literature Association, Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, and on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association.  Dr. Wettlaufer is a core faculty member of Comparative Literature, Women's and Gender Studies, and European Studies.   

John Morán González, Associate Director
Professor, Department of English
Former Director of The Center for Mexican American Studies

Acting Director for the 2022-2023 academic year

From the border town of Brownsville, Texas, John Morán González attended Princeton University, graduating magna cum laudewith an A.B. in English literature in 1988. At Stanford University, he earned an M.A. degree in 1991, and a Ph.D. in 1998, both in English and American literature. He teaches as a Professor in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin. He currently serves as Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies and on the Advisory Board of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project. He has published in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, Aztlán, Western American Literature, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Symbolism. He is the author of two books: Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican-American Literature (2009), and The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels (2010). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o American Literature (2016). He is co-editor (with Laura Lomas) of The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature (2018). In addition, he is a founding member of Refusing to Forget, a public history project dedicated to critically memorializing state violence in the South Texas borderlands, 1910-1920.

Richard Reddick, Assistant Director Senior Vice Provost for Curriculum & Enrollment and Dean of Undergraduate Studies Designate, Associate Dean for Equity, Community Engagement and Outreach, College of Education

Dr. Richard J. Reddick is an award-winning Associate Professor in Educational Administration, with courtesy appointments in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, and the Warfield Center of African and African American Studies. Dr. Reddick is also the Faculty Director for Campus Diversity Initiatives in the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, the Assistant Director of the Plan II Honors Program in the College of Liberal Arts, and serves as a faculty fellow in the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis, all at The University of Texas at Austin.

His research focuses on several areas: the experiences of Black faculty and faculty of color at predominantly White institutions; mentoring and developmental relationships between faculty and Black students; and work-life balance in academia. Reddick’s research has been published in the American Educational Research Journal and Harvard Educational Review, featured on NPR and the Associated Press, and he has contributed over 50 scholarly articles, chapters, and entries, including four co-authored and co-edited scholarly volumes. Dr. Reddick is also active in national research associations, most notably the American Educational Research Association and the Association for the Study of Higher Education.
Dr. Reddick holds a master’s and doctorate in higher education from Harvard University, and a bachelor’s from The University of Texas at Austin. He is married and the father of two children, serves on the boards of two public charter schools, and is actively engaged in organizations focused on improving the quality of life for citizens of color in Austin, Texas. A game show maven, Dr. Reddick is also a former Jeopardy! champion and Wheel of Fortune College Week champion.