Frederick A. de Armas

Frederick A. de Armas (born 1945) is a literary scholar, critic and novelist who has been Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in Humanities at the University of Chicago.

This study focuses on Cervantes' most famous tragedy, La Numancia, showing how it is engaged in a conversation with classical authors of Greece and Rome, especially through the interpretations of antiquity presented by the artist Raphael.

His Don Quixote among the Saracens: Clashes of Civilizations and Literary Genres (2011) has received the American Publishers' Association PROSE Award in Literature, Honorable Mention (2011).

He co-edited Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain (2019), an essay collection dedicated to the scholarly work of Bárbara Mujica,[9] a volume that attests to his continuing interest in issues of proto-feminism in the Iberian Peninsula.

Shortly after penning a co-edited collection, The Gastronomical Arts in Spain: Food and Etiquette (2022), he published a book prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic,Cervantes' Architectures The Dangers Outside (2022).

The volume takes as a point of departure Yi-Fu Tuan's ideas of space as freedom and danger versus place as safety, and how this opposition plays out in Cervantes' fiction.

His novel, El abra del Yumuri, takes place in Cuba during the last three months of 1958, just before the fall of Fulgencio Batista and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.

For some critics, the novel combines two very different trends: that of the social novel inspired by Benito Pérez Galdós, and that of magic realism embodied by Alejo Carpentier.