Faculty News

Department Mourns the Passing of Maryellen Bieder

It is with great sadness that the Department of Spanish and Portuguese conveys the loss of our colleague, Professor Emerita Maryellen Bieder. She died on January 31, 2018. An established and prolific scholar of international stature in the field of Spanish literature and culture of the nineteenth century, her more recent research also explored the works of twentieth-century and contemporary peninsular writers. An indefatigable scholar known for her keen intelligence and clear writing, Maryellen was recognized on both sides of the Atlantic as a pioneer in feminist approaches to canonical writer Emilia Pardo Bazán, and she single-handedly resurrected critical knowledge of Carmen de Burgos. She also brought other women writers—such as Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer, Carme Riera, Mercè Rodoreda and Marina Mayoral to international attention.

Maryellen devoted 38 years of her professional life to the department, and lived more than four decades in Bloomington with her husband, Robert Bieder, PhD, an expert on native American cultural history. However, her connection to Indiana University did not begin with her accepting a position as assistant professor in 1976. After Maryellen was awarded her AB degree from Lawrence University, she and Robert each received their MA’s from IU Bloomington before ultimately earning PhDs in their respective fields at the University of Minnesota. Before joining our department, Maryellen held assistant professorship positions at Syracuse University (1973-1974) and at the State University of New York at Albany (1974-1976). 

If some of the best indications of professional activities in the Humanities are students and publications, Maryellen’s career was a remarkable one. Eighteen students earned their doctoral degrees writing dissertations under her careful attention, and she served on the doctoral committees of eighteen more. She also enjoyed working with undergraduate students and one of her most gratifying experiences was to serve as Resident Director of the Madrid Program (2004-2005). She authored Narrative Perspective in the Post-Civil War Novels of Francisco Ayala (1979), and edited volumes such as La novela en español, hoy (Revista Iberoamericana, 1981) and Writing Against the Current (Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literatures, 1993). More recently, she collaborated with Roberta Johnson to co-edit Spanish Women Writers and Spain´s Civil War (2017). Maryellen published nearly 60 book chapters and journal articles and remained an active scholar up until the end of her life. She was working on a book-length manuscript entitled “Women in the Public Eye: Images of Spanish Women Authors in the Periodical Press, 1880-1920,” and had innumerable projects on the back burner. In true Maryellen fashion, she submitted her last article from the hospital on the day before she passed.

Numerous awards and accolades recognized Maryellen’s achievements as a scholar and teacher. She was the recipient of a Fulbright grant, received funds from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain and the US and from the Mellon Foundation, as well as countless travel and research grants. She won the Francis M. Kercheville Prize from the journal Anales Galdosianos in 1997, an IU Trustees Teaching Award (2004) and, in 2011, an award from the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts as an “Alumna of Notable Achievement.”   

Professor Joseph Snow knew her since the 1970s, when she was his student working on her doctorate at the University of Minnesota. He remembers that “as time went on and through many conferences we became great friends, coinciding dozens of times in Madrid where she had many friends (and former students, too).” He describes her as “an outstanding scholar in her field.” Maryellen was held in high esteem amongst colleagues and was a much-loved teacher and mentor. “Her sudden and unexpected death has meant a huge personal loss for me and a significant loss for the profession of Hispanism,” said Roberta Johnson, Professor Emerita at the University of Kansas and a leading scholar in twentieth-century Peninsular Spanish literature and culture. “Maryellen was a generous colleague, never reluctant to share her finds and materials with me and others. She introduced me to Carmen de Burgos, whose hard-to-find novelettes (her works were banned during the Franco regime) Maryellen had unearthed in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid; she photocopied and sent me a number of these. Working with Maryellen in that capacity was a very great pleasure. I miss her terribly, and her death leaves a large hole in US Hispanism, especially in feminist studies.” Michael Schnepf and Jennifer Smith, Spanish literature professors at University of Alabama and Southern Illinois University, respectively, and former doctoral students of Maryellen, expressed the gratitude and admiration they felt for her. Schnepf remarked that Maryellen was not only “a giving and talented professor of Spanish Literature, she was a great friend who went out of her way to help and guide students and colleagues whenever she could.” Smith adds that, “as my professor and mentor, she had a profound impact on my life and career. Her genuine interest in my ideas and work gave me confidence in myself and an enthusiasm for my work that is still with me today. ”

Those who knew her agree in pointing out that one of Maryellen’s greatest loves was Spain, and that passion could be noticed even in the smallest details. In this regard, Antonio Parrilla-Recuero recalls when he first met her in the fall semester of 2009. It was his first year at IU, and he was enrolled in her 19th Century Spanish Literature seminar. Maryellen had to cancel the first week of classes because she had broken her hip a few weeks before the semester began. On the second week, she showed up to class in a wheelchair pushed by her husband. She refused to teach from the wheelchair; she slowly stood up, and to his amazement, pulled out a cushion from a bag from El Corte Inglés and placed it on the desk chair. After that moment, Ballantine Hall felt like home to him. 

Faculty: Books & Awards

Patricia Amaral was awarded the OVPIA Faculty Exchange with Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. The goal of this exchange is to foster collaboration between IU and researchers at the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at ANU. She will develop a research collaboration in the field of syntactic and semantic change in Ibero-Romance and deliver a guest lecture at the Center of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. She received the 2017 Faculty Mentor Award from the department’s Graduate Student Advisory Council. In addition, she was promoted to associate professor with tenure this year.

Anke Birkenmaier was promoted to full professor this year.

Deborah Cohn guest edited an issue of Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (December 2017), a special issue celebrating the 50th anniversary of Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad.  

Manuel Díaz-Campos was awarded a President’s International Research Awards (PIRA) for his proposal “Language Preservation and contact phenomena in a bilingual community in Mexico: Cuicateco and Spanish.”

Manuel Díaz-Campos, Kimberly Geeslin and Laura Gurzynski-Weiss published Introducción y aplicaciones contextualizadas a la lingüística hispánica (Wiley, 2018). 

Kimberly Geeslin gave the keynote “Current Approaches to Long-Standing Conversations: The Implications of New Research on the Acquisition of Spanish as a Second Language” at the conference Evolving Perspectives on Advancedness: A Symposium on Second Language Spanish at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She was awarded a CAHI Conference grant for the roundtable “New Directions in Research on Second Language Sounds in Context,” which was held in conjunction with the 10th anniversary meeting of the “Current Approaches to Spanish and Portuguese Second Language Phonology" conference in spring 2018.

Ryan Giles published Inscribed Power: Amulets and Magic in Early Spanish Literature, (University of Toronto Press, 2017). He also published, with Steven Wagschal,
Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200–1750 (University of Toronto Press, 2018).

Laura Gurzynski-Weiss received the 2018 TESOL Distinguished Research Award for the study “Teachers’ perspectives on second language task difficulty: Insights from eye-tracking and think-alouds” published in the December 2016 issue of Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. The award was conferred at the annual TESOL convention in Chicago in March. Her edited volume, Expanding Individual Difference Research in the Interaction Approach: Investigating Learners, Instructors, and Other Interlocutors, was published by John Benjamins in 2017.

Israel Herrera was named the 2018 National Outstanding Spanish Teacher of the Year by the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP).

Virginia Hojas received a Center for Language Excellence Online Course Deveopment fellowship and a Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning Summer Active Learning grant.

Edgar Illas received a Residential Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study at IU for the Fall 2018 semester for his project “Global War and the Regime of Survival.”

Catherine Larson, Professor Emerita, published her translation of early modern playwright Ângela de Azevedo's El muerto disimulado/Presumed Dead in the Aris and Phillips Hispanic Classics series of Liverpool UP (2018).

Consuelo López-Morillas, Professor Emerita, published a translation of José Miguel Puerta Vilchez’ Aesthetics in Arabic Thought: From Pre-Islamic Arabia through al-Andalus, Brill Press (Leiden, Netherlands), 2017. 

Kathleen Myers published Ni santas ni pecadoras: Mujeres, vida y escritura en Hispanoamérica colonial, a new translation of her 2003 book, which was originally published with Oxford UP and entitled Neither Saints nor Sinners. She received a CAHI travel grant for her project, Cultural Geographies and Memory: Shepherding in Contemporary Spain, and the IU Faculty Research Exchange with the University of Seville. She was also awarded a Summer Instructional Development Fellowship through the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning to develop a new 300-level Hispanic culture course that will be based in a service-learning context. ​She earned the 2018 Trustees Teaching award for tenure-stream faculty.

Luciana Namorato co-edited Luso-Brazilian Literature in/and the Global Context: Crossing Borders, a special issue of Revista Moara, a biannual electronic journal of the graduate program in Literature and Languages of the Federal University of Pará, Brazil. The special issue was volume 48, Aug./Dec. 2017. She gave the keynote “Camilo Castelo Branco e Machado de Assis: Singulares ocorrências? Ou um caso de cumplicidade literária?” at the Lusophone Studies session at Kentucky Foreign Language Conference at the University of Kentucky (Lexington) in April of 2018.

Jonathan Risner received a Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning Summer Instructional Development Fellowship for his proposal “Hazlo tú mismo / Do-It-Yourself: Incorporating Cellphone Cinema Production into Spanish-Language Undergraduate Film Courses.”

Olimpia Rosenthal gave the keynote “The Discovery of the New World in the Cartographic Imaginary of Early Modern Europe,” 12th Annual Conference on Landscape, Space, and Place, Department of Geography, Indiana University in March 2018.

Alina Sokol won the 2018 Trustees Teaching award for NTT faculty.

Estela Vieira received two CAHI awards: a Research Travel grant to conduct research for her book project, “The Invisibles: Women Writers in Nineteen-Century Portugal”; and a CAHI Conference grant, with Professor Johannes Turk of Germanic Studies, to support the symposium they are organizing, "Unaccountable Differences: Jean-François Lyotard’s The Differend." 

Reyes Vila-Belda received an Individual Research grant from the Institute for Advance Study for her project “Poesía femenina de la Guerra Civil.” She also gave the keynote address at Seminario sobre Gloria Fuertes at the Cursos de verano de El Escorial, Universidad Complutense de Madrid during the summer of 2017.

Steven Wagschal was promoted to full professor this year. He published Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200-1750 (University of Toronto Press, 2018) with Ryan Giles. He received a publication grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences for his forthcoming book Minding Animals in the Old and New World: A Cognitive Historical Analysis (University of Toronto Press, 2018) and has also been serving as co-chair of The College of Arts and Sciences’ 2018 Themester; this year’s theme is “Animal/Human.”