Executive Director

Carrie Tirado Bramen Executive Director, Humanities Institute Associate Professor, Department of English Email: bramen@buffalo.edu Click Here to Visit Bramen Faculty Home Page

Carrie Tirado Bramen is Associate Professor of English where she teaches courses in nineteenth century American literature, contemporary US Latino/a literature, critical race theory and cultural and intellectual history. She earned her B.A. degree in Literature and Latin American Studies from the University of Connecticut and an MA degree in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. In 1994, she received her doctorate from Stanford University in Modern Thought and Literature and joined the English Department at UB, where she has been ever since. 

She is the author of The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for Distinctiveness (2000), which was co-winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Prize for best first book published in all fields from the Board of Syndics at Harvard University Press. She has published several articles on a range of topics from historical studies of the urban picturesque and religious pluralism to contemporary African American conceptions of the Mexican borderlands, identity politics and Leslie Fiedler.  Her articles have appeared in American Quarterly, The New England Quarterly, Textual Practice and Modern Fiction Studies.  She is currently working on a book called American Niceness.

She has held a year-long fellowship at the Warren Center for the Study of American History at Harvard University (2005), and has received three teaching awards, including  SUNY’s Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Carrie is delighted to be serving as the Executive Director of the Humanities Institute and looks forward to faciliating conversations across the humanities and beyond, to continue collaborating with arts institutions in Buffalo, and to support faculty research fellowships that will further promote UB as a preeminent research university.