Rate My Professor Robert Wells

Dr. Robert Wells served as Professor of Spanish in the Department of Languages at William Jewell College from 2015 to 2025, including as Chair from 2021 to 2024. He holds a B.A. from the University of Kansas and a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish) from the University of Michigan. His first full-time academic appointment was in 2015. During his tenure at the college, Wells also served as Faculty Advisor for The Hilltop Monitor, the student-run newspaper, and as contact for the Sigma Delta Pi National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society chapter. With more than twenty years of university-level teaching experience, he delivered courses in Spanish language, conversation, composition, Hispanic literature, culture, and film. He also taught general education offerings such as the U.S.-Latinx Experience and world cinema. Wells excelled in engaging students through dialogue-heavy instruction and adapted effectively to hybrid learning environments during the pandemic, utilizing platforms like VoiceThread for audio conversations, multimedia slide-shows, and Moodle for interactive activities.

Wells's research specializations encompass 19th- to 21st-century Latin American and Spanish Peninsular studies, with a focus on historic avant-gardes especially in Argentina and Spain, Southern Cone studies, transatlantic studies, cinema studies, critical theory, and continental philosophy. His publications include scholarly articles such as “Orders and Disorders, Wills to Powers-Arlt and Nietzsche, the Astrólogo and the sociedad secreta” in Dissidences (2013), “Macedonio Fernández at the Front of the Rearguard” in Política común (2014), “The multitude: ambivalence and antagonism” in Rethinking Marxism (2014), “Dehumanized art and its window onto the world: Jose Ortega y Gasset and Pedro Salinas” in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (2016), “Trauma, male fantasies, and cultural capital in the films of Pablo Larraín” in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (2017), “Zombie Bolaño: Revolution and the Undead in ‘El hijo del coronel’” in Hispania (2020), and “Todas las aguas el agua: The Water Within ‘La casa inundada’ by Felisberto Hernández” in Romance Quarterly (2024). He contributed a chapter, “It’s Complicated—Ortega y Gasset’s Relationship with Argentina,” to the volume Transatlantic Studies: Iberia, Latin America, and Africa published by Liverpool University Press in 2019. Wells has presented his research at academic conferences, including a paper titled “Writing on Painting: Vividness and the Void in ‘An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter’.”