Fall 2022 talks, organized by Professor Melissa Dinverno
September 16, 2022
Speaker: Anke Birkenmaier (Professor)
“Alejo Carpentier and Cuba’s Literary Twentieth Century”
Abstract:
Long considered a towering figure of Cuban letters, Alejo Carpentier has also been controversial, both for his unfailing support of Fidel Castro’s government and for some inconsistencies in his official biography. This presentation will take a long view of Carpentier’s novels and his theory of the real marvelous and the American baroque to discuss the idea itself of “Cuban literature” in his works, in light of new findings about Carpentier’s French nationality and passing as a Cuban.
October 28, 2022: A Flash Presentation Round Table
Speakers: Rhi Johnson (Assistant Professor)
“Of Women and Water.”
Abstract:
Women and Water. Fluxes of the Feminine in the Hispanic Nineteenth Century explores the association between femininity and the aqueous as it impacts Spanish modernity. It examines four key valences of the relationship between female figures and the water to demonstrate its impact on the experience and determination of gendered somatic and affective agency and of autonomy.
Estela Vieira (Associate Professor)
“Women Writers in 19th-Century Portugal.”
Abstract:
My current research studies writing by 19th-century Portuguese women writers. I focus on some of the critical debates that have defined this vastly understudied and poorly understood field, a misguided discussion that tends to dismiss this work as second-rate. I then outline alternative forms of conceptualizing their literary contributions by specifying the ways they theorize and articulate feminist poetics.
Alysa Schroff (Visiting Lecturer)
“Recessionary Revenants: Maternal Displacement and the Palimpsestic Llorona in Andrés Muschietti’s Mama.”
Abstract:
With financial, political and (gendered) personal crisis in mind, this project examines director Andrés Muschietti’s and executive producer Guillermo del Toro’s transculturally informed, palimpsestic approach to both La Llorona of Mexican folklore and the 2007 financial crises in their 2013 Hollywood horror film Mama. It also questions what that approach might reveal about numerous crises or foundational instabilities in the binary concepts and identities that serve to uphold borders.
Ricardo Martins (Ph.D. candidate)
“Favela-Fetiche in Brazilian Literature and Cinema: 1960-2010”
Abstract:
In my project, I analyze the images and stereotypes around the favela and its inhabitants that are perpetuated in cinema and in literature. I argue that fetish is the fundamental process allowing these stereotypes to be widely accepted, consumed and reproduced successfully in more recent works.
November 11, 2022
Speaker: Andrea Carrillo (Ph.D. candidate)
“Two Sides of the Same Anomic Coin: The Demobilized Ex-Combatants in El arma en el hombre (2001) y Moronga (2018) by Horacio Castellanos Moya.”
Abstract:
I examine Salvadoran Civil War demobilized ex-combatants in the novels “El arma en el hombre (2001) and Moronga (2018), proposing that neoliberalism’s individualism brings about what I call affective and explicit anomie in a vicious cycle where both forces feed off each other. Here, explicit anomie is the literary recreation of a situation of habitually broken and unenforced laws or law-breaking in the form of drug trafficking and organized crime, while affective anomie is the portrayal of characters who feel anxious, lost, ambivalent, left to their own devices, and estranged from a society that does not serve as a model for norms, beliefs, and values. I show how the vicious cycle of both forces results in a deep identity crisis of maladaptation to civilian life (affective anomie) that compels both male protagonists to embody explicit anomie in the illicit, since both have staked their identities on being men of war.
December 2, 2022
Speaker: Taís Xavier Carvalho (Ph.D. candidate)
“Children’s Literature and Censorship in the Argentine and Brazilian Dictatorships of the 70s and 80s.”
Abstract:
Brazil and Argentina have undergone strict military dictatorships that applied censorship methods to works of art in order to control the population. In this sense it is interesting to note the kind of relationship each government had with children’s literature – especially since they adopted different approaches. Through the analysis of children’s books published between the 1960s and 1980s, my work examines the way in which the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985) and the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983) impacted the development of children’s literature in each country and how the literary field reacted to the limits imposed by these governments.
Spring 2023 talks, organized by Professor Deborah Cohn
February 10, 2023
Speaker: Kathleen Myers (Professor)
“A Country of Shepherds: Stories of Tradition and Renewal.”
Abstract:
As a student of early modern Hispanic culture and a frequent visitor to Spain, I came to understand that the ancient practice of shepherding has occupied a central place in the cultural identity narratives of the Iberian Peninsula for centuries. Chance encounters with modern pastoralists who share rural trails I hiked on, along with more organized events such as the annual Festival of Trashumancia, during which sheep are driven through the streets of downtown Madrid along ancient rights of way, led me to realize that these ancient practices are still alive today. An outsider’s curiosity led to years of interviewing shepherds and their families, landowners, activists, and government officials. Through these interviews and site visits, I learned of the landscapes, life practices, and challenges as well as the vital significance of this way of life to a globally interconnected system. A Country of Shepherds: Stories of Tradition and Renewal details how traditional pastoralism is being reconfigured and even remarketed to a new generation. The conversation and life stories give a face and voice to a complex national and international conversation about sustainability, food systems, and cultural traditions. By sharing this living archive of interviews and my own process of discovery along the way, A Country of Shepherds helps document this ancient system and its transformation in the 21st century, and suggests ways we all, as global citizens, can be involved and help.
March 24, 2023: A Flash Presentation Round Table
Speakers: Matt Peisen (Ph.D. candidate)
“Blindness, Syphilis, and Impotence: Disability and the Monstrous in Early Modern Spanish Literature”
Jennifer Formwalt (Visiting Lecturer)
“Resisting Traditions: Using Fictional Biographies of Radical Historical Women to Understand the Social Context of Race, Class and Gender Oppression in the Hispanophone Caribbean.”
Laís Lara Vanin (Ph.D. candidate)
“Encrespando o Cânone: An Ethnography Study of Afro Hair and the Bodies of Black Brazilian Women in the Literature of the Black Atlantic.”
Roberto Amado (Ph.D. candidate)
“Connections between the Novels of Brazil and the U.S. in the 1930s.”
April 14, 2023
Speaker: Luciana Namorato (Associate Professor)
“Almeida Garrett, Machado de Assis, and Camilo Castelo Branco: A Literary Embrace Across the Atlantic.”
Abstract:
Prevailing thought holds that Portuguese and Brazilian literary traditions emerged in separate and parallel fashion following Brazil’s independence in 1822. However, a strong cultural exchange, as well as publications that traversed the Atlantic, created bonds between Brazil and Portugal that Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) characterized as “a literary embrace.” This bilateral flow of texts and ideas during a crucial period of national development (1840-1910) influenced Portuguese and Brazilian letters in ways that are still not fully appreciated. Two key figures in this exchange, in addition to Machado de Assis, were the Portuguese writers Almeida Garrett (1799-1854) and Camilo Castelo Branco (1825-1890). This talk provides a glimpse into the literary affinities among these three renowned authors of the Lusophone world.
The College of Arts