Dr Amy Austin
Dr. Amy Austin was accepted to participate in the National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Institute entitled “The Medieval Mediterranean and the Emergence of the West.” This four-week seminar in Barcelona will bring together scholars from across disciplines to reassess the role of medieval Europe in the emergence of the modern world. With the help of the NEH summer institute grant, she aims to enhance the archival research on her book-length project, In Other Words: Images and Spaces of Convivencia in Medieval Iberia. This is a comparative study that proposes a redefinition of the debated notion of the three-culture convivencia through an examination of how the processes of translatio in the works of Catalan author, philosopher, and theologian Ramon Llull (1232-1316?) inform the readings of canonical and peripheral texts of medieval Iberia. In October 2007, Dr. Austin presented a paper at the Mid-America Conference on Hispanic Literature in Madison, Wisconsin entitled “Love of Language as the Language of Love in the Libro de buen amor.”
Dr. Chris Conway
As of the end of the Spring semester of 2008, Dr. Chris Conway is stepping down as coordinator of the Spanish section. Dr. Jinny Choi will be coordinator of the Spanish program as of the Fall of 2008. But when one door closes, another opens: Dr. Conway was named co-chair of the UT Arlington One Book program. His responsibilities as faculty co-chair begin in the Summer of 2008. In conjunction with Dr. Dawn Remmers, Dr. Conway will oversee the selection of the book that all incoming first year students will read in English 1301, and design university wide programming in support of the yearly theme of the One Book program. In March Dr. Conway presented a scholarly paper titled “The Most Dangerous Dance: The Reception of the Can-Can in Nineteenth-Century Mexico” at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Romance Languages Conference.
Dr. Sonia Kania
Dr. Sonia Kania will be participating in a roundtable discussion, “Resources for Teaching the History of the Spanish Language,” at the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 8-11, 2008. Dr. Kania’s article “A linguistic analysis of Part 1 of the Probanza de méritos of Vicente de Zaldívar (1601-1602)” has been accepted by the Southwest Journal of Linguistics and will appear in the June 2008 issue (Vol. 27, No. 1). Her work editing the Probanza de méritos, a 134-folio document from 1600-1602 written in Mexico and New Mexico, is part of the larger Cíbola Project, which is concerned with the edition and publication of documents of the Hispanic Southwest from the 16th-18th centuries.
Dr. Alicia Rueda Acedo
Dr. Alicia Rueda Acedo is very pleased to have been awarded a Faculty Development Leave. She has decided to take the Spring of 2009 to complete a scholarly monograph entitled Crossing Borders from Non-fiction to Fiction and from Mexico to Spain: Journalism and Literature in the Writing of Elena Poniatowska and Rosa Montero. Her study examines the relationship between the journalistic and literary work of two female writers/journalists from Spain and Mexico: Elena Poniatowska and Rosa Montero. In their writings, both Montero and Poniatowska explore cultural repression, identity, politics and gender roles. In particular, both writers utilize a distinct combination of journalism and fiction to create new spaces for women’s voices and experiences to be situated prominently in their nations’ historical narratives. She analyzes Poniatowska and Montero’s works from the perspectives of both gender and genre studies. In her book, she extends the notion of genre from its literary tradition and applies it to journalistic production. Each of the chapters of her book rethinks and revises the concept of literary genres by arguing for the inclusion of journalistic genres such as the interview and the chronicle within the category of ‘literature’. She examines how Poniatowska and Montero pay homage to women that have influenced History. By means of interpreting and subverting patriarchal models, they draw attention to the ways in which women have engaged with Mexican or Spanish history.
Dr. Georgia Seminet
Dr. Georgia Seminet works in the area of Modern Latin American Literature. This academic year she has published an article in Hispania, “Positioned Between Limits and Desire: National Reality vs. National Romance in Mal de Amores,” and has had an article on teaching Latin American Literature and globalization accepted for publication in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice. For the fall of 2008 and spring 2009, Dr. Seminet has been awarded a Faculty Development Leave to complete a book tentatively entitled “Insanity,Chaos and Madness as Metaphors for Globalization in Latin American Narrative.”
Dr. Sonja Watson
With the help of the Research Enhancement Program grant, during the summer of 2009 Dr. Watson will conduct research in Panama City, Panama on the role of women writers of African descent in the development of Afro-Panamanian national identity. In The Cultural Politics of Race in Afro-Panamanian Discourse, the working title of the larger project, she argues that the cultural and linguistic distinctions between Afro-Hispanics and Afro-Caribbeans and the overt national discrimination directed towards the latter, have divided the two populations among cultural and linguistic lines despite their common African heritage. More specifically, she explores the formation of Afro-Panamanian identity by examining the literature of Afro-Hispanics, Spanish-speaking blacks who came as slaves to the Isthmus, and English-speaking Afro-Caribbeans, West Indian immigrants who migrated to work on the Trans-isthmian Railroad (1850-1855) and Panama Canal (1903-1914). To date, no one has published a book-length manuscript on the development of Afro-Panamanian discourse. Her study will fill a void in the field of Hispanic, Caribbean, and Diaspora Studies.
