Ashford King is a scholar of the literary and cultural traditions of the Spanish-speaking U.S. South, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World, with an emphasis on the Gulf of Mexico region during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He earned a doctorate in Spanish and Portuguese from Princeton University in 2026 with the dissertation “‘Good Migrants’: Canary Islander Cultural Production in Louisiana and Cuba, 1763-1868.” He is now working on his first book project, which attends to the literary and cultural practices of rural multiethnic communities of the lower Mississippi River Valley during the period of Spanish claim. He is also a musician and songwriter.

Selected Publications
King, Ashford. “Agustín Millares Torres’s El último de los canarios: A Literary Conversation with James Fenimore Cooper on Indigeneity and Mestizaje in the Atlantic World.” Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos, no. 72, 2025, pp. 1-13. https://revistas.grancanaria.com/index.php/aea/article/view/11161/10668.

King, Ashford. “Reading the ‘Living Rock’: Excavating the Transhistorical Record of Racial Sedimentation in the Literature of Navassa Island.” Atlantic Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, 2024, pp. 103-131. https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2024.2350303. 

King, Ashford. “The Various Baratarias: Quixotic Toponymy in the Americas.” Cervantes: Journal of the Cervantes Society of America, vol. 43, no. 2, 2023, pp. 133-162. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922298.

Service to the Profession
Board member, Institute for Public Ethnomusicology, New Orleans, Louisiana. 2024-present.

Advisory board member, Fundación Juan Brito, Lanzarote, Spain. 2026-present.