Faculty Professors, Faculty, Department of Spanish & Portuguese: WCAS

Josef Barton, Ph.D. University of Michigan, Chair, Department of Spanish & Portuguese; Associate Professor, Department of History

Josef Barton is a historian of modern United States and Latin America. His research and teaching deals with the topics of immigration, labor, and environment, in the case of the United States, and in the themes of peasantries and rural communities, in connection with Latin America. The author of Peasants and Strangers: Italians, Romanians,and Slovaks in an American City, 1890-1950 (Harvard University Press, 1975), and recipient of American Council of Learned Societies, NEH, and Fulbright fellowships, he has recently completed a book on capitalism and the persistence of community in Mexico and the Southwest, 1880-1930. His new research takes up two topics, one the experience of rural women in Mexico in the early 20th century, the other East-Central and Southern European immigrants’ health care between 1880 and 1940. He currently serves as director of the Chicago Field Studies Program and as co-director (with Brodwyn Fischer of History and Jorge Coronado of Spanish and Portuguese) of “How Do the Poor Constitute Community?” a Rockefeller Foundation funded project in the Program on Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Nathalie Bouzaglo, Ph.D. New York University, Assistant Professor
Nathalie Bouzaglo specializes in 19th- and early 20th- century Latin American Literature. In her dissertation, "Pasiones ilícitas: nación y adulteración en la novela del fin de siècle," she addresses the function of adultery-understood both as a violation of the family structure, and more generally as the adulteration of any homogeneous and closed system-in nation-building. Her research interests also include the relationship between Law, literature and ethics.

Jorge Coronado, Ph.D. Columbia University, Assistant Professor
Jorge Coronado's field of specialization is twentieth-century Latin American literature, with an emphasis on Latin American intellectual history, poetics, and literary and cultural criticism. His dissertation, "Displaced Modernities: Poetry and Politics in the Andean Avant-Garde" (Columbia, 2002), explores the crucial interventions through which the Andean vanguard sought to reconcile the traditional aspects of their culture with a modernization imported to the region from the United States and Europe. He argues that, by drawing in equal parts from such local ideologies as indigenous utopianism and such foreign theories as Marxism, Andean writers and critics forged a compatibility of the autochthonous with the modern through the simultaneous enunciation of seemingly contradictory discourses. His analyses center on three such enunciations: the revolutionary indigenism promoted by the literary critic José Carlos Mariátegui, the harmonious cityscape that the poet Carlos Oquendo de Amat dreamed of forging from the alien cultures of the sierra and the booming city, and the return to orality that the poet César Vallejo envisioned through a reconfiguration of Spanish Civil War poetry. His current research explores the place of racial types and marginal cultures in the utopian and revolutionary writings of José Carlos Mariátegui and César Vallejo. He has contributed book reviews and translations to el diario/la prensa, travesía: Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and La vitrina.

Gonzalo Diaz-Migoyo, Ph.D. New York University, Professor
Gonzalo Díaz-Migoyo specializes in the literature and culture of Spain and Spanish America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in twentieth-century Hispanic narrative. He is currently working on a project about "morisco" life in Northern Castile.

Darío Fernández-Morera, Ph.D. Harvard University, Associate Professor
Professor Darío Fernández-Morera holds a B.A. from Stanford University, an M.A. in Romance Languages from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Presently tenured Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese. He has taught sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish literature (Golden Age), Comparative Literature courses, Cervantes, the Renaissance, Origins of Spanish Civilization, Freshman Seminars and other classes. He has been confirmed by the United States Senate as a member of the National Council on the Humanities. In his classes he emphasizes close reading of the texts, knowledge of the historical background, and student research based on primary sources. For Fernandez-Morera, the truth is out there; but sometimes we have to work quite hard to find it. His publications include books and editions in English and Spanish and numerous articles and review articles in English and Spanish on critical discourses and methodology, cultural issues in Latin America, Spain, and the United States, contemporary political events, modern poetry, the encounter between Europeans and Amerindians, Modernism, Cervantes, Garcilaso de la Vega, Fray Luis de León, and Vicente Aleixandre. He has reviewed books and served as consultant and reader for History of European Ideas, The European Legacy, Symposium, Hispanic Review, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, etc. Some selected publications include American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas; The Lyre and the Oaten Flute: Garcilaso and the Pastoral; Fray Luis: Poesía (ed); The Cultural Encounter Between Europeans and Amerindians (ed.); Cervantes in the English Speaking World (ed. with M. Hanke); Cervantes y su mundo II (ed with K. Reichenberger); ”Cervantes’ Theory and Practice of the Modern Novel,” in double issue of CIEFL Bulletin vol. 15 no. 2 and vol. 16 no. 1, pp. 49-66; ”The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise” (Now online at http://www.isi.org/journals/archive/issue.aspx?id=f6e1ad61-8699-4622-9d66-3d4aac01b072 ; already translated into a number of languages including Polish (see http://www.europa21.pl/News-article-sid-11334.html ); also available at Light Mind Forum, War and Peace section at http://www.lightgate.net/boards/viewtopic.php?t=5655&view=next). "Cervantes and the Aesthetics of Reception" (in Comparative Literature Studies; rept. in James person, ed. Literature Criticism: from 1400 to 1800, 1994); "Inca Garcilaso's Comentarios Reales or Who Tells the Story of a Conquered Civilization" in Comparative Civilizations Review (Spring 2008); "Chivalry, Symbolism, and Psychology in Cervantes' Knight of the Green Cloak," (Hispanic Review, 1993). Fernandez-Morera is now working on a book manuscript, Muslims, Jews and Catholics in al-Andalus: The Reality of Islamic Spain.

Lucille Kerr, Ph.D. Yale University, Professor
Lucille Kerr's area of research is modern Latin American literature, with emphasis on narrative fiction, the Boom and post-Boom eras, literary history, and literary theory. She is the author of Suspended Fictions: Reading Novels by Manuel Puig (U of Illinois P) and Reclaiming the Author: Figures and Fictions from Spanish America (Duke UP). Her scholarly articles have appeared in journals such as Criticism, Diacritics, MLN, PMLA, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Journal of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Symposium, and World Literature Today and she is among the contributors to the Latin American Literatures: A Comparative History of Cultural Formations (Oxford UP/Fondo de Cultura Económica/ UFRJ). Her current research deals with literary and cultural history during the second half of the twentieth century. Drawing on archival and literary materials, she is studying Latin American literary culture from the 1960s onward, looking at writers whose careers were shaped as much by the marketing of Latin American literature as by their own literary interests, international travels and residences. She is also engaged in a group project to document linkages between Latin American literature and film. Her research has been supported by grants from the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science Research Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has served on the Editorial Boards of Hispania, Latin American Literary Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Siglo XX/20th Century, and as Review Editor for Latin American Literary Review. She has directed doctoral research on colonial and nineteenth-century Latin American literature as well as on twentieth-century topics, including studies of Cuban anti-slavery narratives, the "grotesco criollo" in Argentina, the "new" historical novel, the journal Mundo Nuevo, testimonial narrative and film, Eva Perón, and mestizaje and multiculturalism in the Americas, among others.

Elisa Martí-López, Ph.D. New York University, Associate Professor
Elisa Martí-López's field of specialization is Catalan and Spanish literature and culture, with emphasis on the literature and culture of the nineteenth century, literary history and the novel. Her recent research addresses an apparent paradox that underlies the processes of cultural production and consumption in mid-nineteenth-century Europe--nations at different narrative stages became contiguous literary markets. She has challenged prevailing views of the development of the novel in nineteenth-century Spain by demonstrating how translations and imitations of foreign literary models became the foundation for the development of the bourgeois novel in Spain. Her book Borrowed Words: Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Bucknell UP, 2002) shows how the Spanish novel originated in those foreign texts, how the Spanish writers appropriated and borrowed from the original works to create the beginnings of the novel in Spain. She is currently working on a book that questions the metaphorical value assigned to the capital (of a state) and, specifically, to the literature written about and from the capital as privileged referent for the nation. In this study she is also analyzing literary representations of the city in nineteenth-century Spain, especially in the narrative of Narcís Oller. Some of her scholarly work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bulletin Hispanique, Catalan Review, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, Siglo diecinueve, and The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel from 1880 to the Present.

Yarí Pérez Marín, Ph.D. Brown University, Assistant Professor
Yarí Pérez Marín specializes in colonial Latin American literature and culture. Her research interests also include Caribbean literature, history of science and women's writing. In her dissertation entitled "Curiosos romancistas": la epistemología europea y la literatura médica novohispana, she examines texts written in Spain and colonial Mexico between 1565 and 1595, when American nature takes center stage in the ongoing feud between Renaissance humanism and experiential modes of knowledge-production. Her analysis makes a case for the incorporation of scientific writing into current discussions on early modern historiography and literature. She has published her work in the Cincinnati Romance Review and has an article forthcoming in the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos.

Sacramento Roselló–Martinez, Visiting Professor

PhD candidate (ABD) Georgetown University

Sacramento’s field of study is Medieval Iberian literature. In her dissertation entitled:

Specters of the Reconquest: Sovereignty, Masculinity and Messianism in Fifteenth century

Spanish Historiography, she studies the connections between genre, gender and ideology as

they articulate a national narrative based on a geopolitical and religious unity. Her

dissertation topic touches upon issues in literary criticism such as medievalism, memory,

history and fiction, gender studies and religion. She has an interest in studying those topics in

contemporary Spanish culture, literature and film. Sacramento has teaching and administrative experience in Study Abroad programs in the Universidad de Alicante and Universidad Miguel Hernandez in Spain. Previous to her hiring at Northwestern. Sacramento has taught at Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University and Depauw

University.

Alejandra Uslenghi – Phd in Comparative Literature, New York University- Visiting Assistant Professor.

Alejandra Uslenghi’s field of specialization is 19th and 20th century Latin American Literature and Visual Culture. Her dissertation “Images of Modernity: Latin American Culture and Universal Exhibitions” examines the modernizing discourses in literature and culture at the turn of the century in Argentina, Mexico and Brazil, alongside the development of modern visual culture, which introduced new technologies for the visual construction of the social. Within this framework, Universal Exhibitions offer the possibility of historicizing how these forms of visualization came to actively shape the discourses on landscape and national identity, subjectivity and technology, spectacle and urban experience in Latin American culture within a comparative and emerging global context. She is currently working on a series of essays on literature and photography in Latin American culture. Her other research interests also include modern aesthetics, comparative modernisms, gender and postcolonial studies.