Arias is a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur professor of 20th-century
Spanish-American Literature at the
University of California, Merced. He has taught courses specializing in: Central American literature; Indigenous literatures; social and critical theory; race, gender and sexuality in post-colonial societies; cultural studies, and ethnographic approaches. Arias previously taught at
San Francisco State University, the
University of Redlands in Southern California, and the
University of Texas at Austin, where he was the Tomás Rivera Regents Professor in Spanish Language and Literature. He is a past president of the
Latin American Studies Association. He holds a PhD in Sociology of Literature, from L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes Paris, France. (1978) Arias has held several prestigious fellowships—the Guggenheim (John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation), the Hood (University of Auckland) and the Martha Sutton Weeks (Stanford Humanities Center)--as well as distinguished visiting posts at Princeton,
Tulane, and the
University of Oregon. Arias has published numerous novels, as well as scholarly books and journal articles, in English and Spanish. He received the
Casa de las Américas Prize for his novel
Itzam Na (1981), the Anna Seghers award for his novel
Jaguar en llamas (1990), and the Casa de las Américas prize in essay for his book
Ideología, Literatura y Sociedad durante la Revolución Guatemalteca, 1944-1954 (1979). In 2008, he was honored with the Miguel Angel Asturias National Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature in his native
Guatemala. == Works of Fiction in Spanish ==