I Jornadas de Cultura, Lengua y Literatura Coloniales

12/07/2009 08:40:00 AM Posted by spanport news


 

Text by El Centro de Estudios Coloniales Iberoamericanos de UCLA
Photos by Bruce Tran and Nivardo Valenzuela



Famed Mexican writer and scholar Margo Glantz inaugurated the I Jornadas de Cultura, Lengua y Literatura Coloniales conference held at UCLA on November 19-21, 2009 with an informative and delightful presentation titled “El naufragio: ¿crónica, ficción, historia?”.

The event was organized by CECI (Centro de Estudios Coloniales Iberoamericanos), the UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese and UC-Mexicanistas. The well attended conference brought together participants from several institutions in the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina, Spain, France and Norway. The thirty papers, gathered into ten panels, demonstrated the vitality and wide range of research being conducted in the field of Colonial Studies today. Selected papers from the conference will be published in 2010.

Other plenary speakers included Professors Sara Poot Herrera (UCSB), Kevin Terraciano (UCLA), María José Rodilla (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana), and Claudia Parodi (CECI, UCLA). UCLA participants and presenters included  Professor Anna More  and CECI members Ángela Helmer, Covadonga Lamar Prieto, Lizy Moromisato, Jimena Rodríguez,  Belén Villareal and Bryan Green.
            
Members of CECI, an interdisciplinary research group housed at UCLA, founded and directed by Prof. Claudia Parodi, are currently working on an annotated edition of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Neptuno alegórico (1680). This project is being conducted in joint collaboration with the Universidad de Navarra’s Grupo Investigación Siglo de Oro (Griso) and it will be published by Iberoamericana Vervuert.

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Distinguished Alumni Lecture 2009

12/06/2009 10:53:00 AM Posted by spanport news


Text by Arno Argueta
Photos by Cassandra Tesch


On November 5th and 6th, 2009, the UCLA Department of Spanish & Portuguese presented Michael Gerli as the 2009 Distinguished Alumni. Started in 1998 and continued thanks to the generous contribution made by Shirley Aurora, the recognition is bestowed annually to department alumni who have demonstrated exceptional academic achievements in the field of Luso-Hispanic literature and linguistics. 

Professor Gerli was treated to a welcome dinner reception on Thursday, November 5th in which his longtime personal friend and colleague, Professor John Dagenais, introduced him as the, “friendly, generous and open person we all know.” Among the attendees were Gonzalo Navajas, Harvey Sharrer, Sherry Velasco, Mary Coffey, Gloria Galvez-Carlisle and previous Distinguished Alumna Roberta Johnson in addition to department faculty, students, staff and other alumni. 

The following day Professor Gerli presented a lecture on Americo Castro (1885-1972), a controversial historian who taught extensively at Universidad de Madrid and Princeton University. Professor Gerli synthesized Americo Castro’s perspective as one that proposes, “that Spaniards got ipseidad (oneness, identity) through the creation of different casts after the reconquista... [it was the] result of a need for convivencia …coexistence based on a mutual self-interest.” Stressing Castro’s ideals as “maybe the first cultural historian” and “an escape from historical canonicity,” he ended his speech with the assertion that “history remains an art and not a science.” 

After receiving both his B.A. and Ph.D. from UCLA in 1968 and 1972, Professor Gerli went on to become one of the most renowned scholars in the field of Medieval Iberian literature. His book Reading, Writing and Rewriting in Cervantes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995) was chosen as an “Outstanding Academic Book” by the American Association of College and University Libraries in 1996. He also edited Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2003). This year, Dr. Gerli will be publishing a new book, Celestina and the Ends of Desire, which he describes as “an attempt to understand the transformation, the goals and the ends of desire.” 

Professor Gerli is currently at the University of Virginia but was previously at Georgetown University where he served as chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese for twelve years.

In his remarks on Friday, November 6th, Dr. Gerli reminisced about his years at UCLA, which to him, is the institution “which gave me the foundations to appreciate literature in a great time for this department.” Dr. Gerli continues to describe the UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese as “vox clamatix in deserto” (voice clamoring in the desert)—an institution that engaged “hispanismo from a new perspective: Americo Castro’s perspective.”

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