MESDA Speaker: Andy Reynolds

Since 1996, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese has paid tribute to a long-serving and distinguished emeritus professor through an alumni lecture in his honor. Professor Merle E. Simmon was a professor and scholar of Spanish American Colonial Literature at IU from 1942 to 1983. Professor Simmons' contributions to the department and to scholarship included authoring seven books, developing the program of study in Spanish American Colonial Literature at Indiana University, and serving as director of graduate studies for seven years and department chair for five. Each fall, the department honors Professor Simmons by inviting a distinguished alum to visit Bloomington, speak to the department's faculty and students, and reconnect with his or her roots as a part of the Merle E. Simmons Distinguished Alumni (MESDA) Lecture.

In September, Professor Andy Reynolds presented our annual MESDA Lecture. Andy Reynolds came to IU to pursue his graduate studies after receiving his B.A. from the University of Massachusetts. He obtained his MA in Spanish in 2005 and his Ph.D. in Hispanic Literatures in 2009. After fifteen years as a faculty member at West Texas A&M University, where he directed the Spanish Program, in fall 2024 he is starting a new stage in his career as Full Professor at Texas Tech University. 

Prof. Reynolds is a leading expert of Spanish American Modernism and the work of Rubén Darío in particular. It is in his innovative foregrounding of the materiality of modernismo’s literary enterprise, focusing on its complex and organic relationship to journalism, material and visual cultures, the newspaper and book industries, a burgeoning celebrity culture, travel, commerce, and politics, that Prof. Reynolds has been making for years an indelible mark in modernist and Latin American studies. In addition to numerous articles, he is the author of the book The Spanish American Crónica Modernista, Temporality and Material Culture: Modernismo’s Unstoppable Presses (Bucknell UP 2012) as well as co-editor of the volumes Behind the Masks of Modernism: Global and Transnational Perspectives (U of Florida P, 2016) and Latin American Textualities: History, Materiality, and Digital Media (U of Arizona P, 2018). He was the guest editor of “Ruben Dario and Modernismo Today” a Special Issue of Review: Literature and Arts in the Americas (2018) and of “Spanish American Textuality and Editorial Thought” a Special Issue of the Journal Textual Cultures (2020).

It was an honor to have Prof. Reynolds back at IU to share with us part of his forthcoming book Reflecting the Fin de Siglo: Print and Visual Media in Spanish America at the Turn of the 20th Century. He talked to us about the creation and expansion of a “visual community” in different kinds of media, from newspapers, magazines, and postcards to manuscripts and personal letters, during modernismo. The prevalence and ubiquity of visual culture forced modernista writers to rethink the place of writing, the writer, and the public in Latin American rapidly changing societies. His excellent lecture was followed by a lively conversation with the audience before he joined us for our annual departmental reception that evening.

This coming fall, David Hodge (B.A. ‘89, Indiana University), US Consulate General in Curacao, will present the MESDA lecture. We hope you will plan to join us on September 13, 2024 for this exciting lecture and the reception that follows!

Yuri Herrera Visit

One of Mexico’s most renowned writers today, Yuri Herrera (Actopan, Hidalgo, México, 1970), visited the Department on Friday, November 17, to present a literary workshop and a keynote lecture. Both events were open to the public and attended by numerous undergraduate and graduate students, and faculty.

In the workshop, moderated by Professor Birkenmaier, participants discussed Herrera’s recent book of science fiction short stories Diez planetas (Ten planets), with a focus on questions of translation, character, and storytelling.

In his keynote Lecture, entitled “Estación del pantano: Benito Juárez en Nueva Orleans,” Herrera gave a presentation on his historical novel about Benito Juárez, Mexico’s first indigenous president, during his exile in New Orleans and before his fateful return to Mexico.

Daniel Olson Visit

On April 5, 2024, Purdue University professor Daniel J. Olson visited the Department to present a talk entitled “Not all bilinguals are the same: How code-switching experience shapes bilingual behaviors”. The talk was organized by Professor Erik W. Willis and Dr. Olson shared his work related to U.S. bilingualism, Spanish heritage speakers, and code-switching. The talk was attended by graduate students, instructors, and professors from within and outside of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese.

Prior to the talk, several students studying bilingualism met with Dr. Olson over dinner at Mother Bear’s and discussed dissertation research and personal projects (see photo below). During his talk, Dr. Olson presented the process of creating a task which determines dominance in code-switching entitled the Bilingual Code-Switching Profile. After the talk, Dr. Olson spoke with several students about their research and gave individual feedback and insights to help develop their work. 

African Literature in Portuguese Events

In Spring 2024, Professor Estela Vieira taught “African Literature in Portuguese” (HISP-P710) a graduate course joint-listed with African Studies (AFRI-A731) on Lusophone African literature and culture. The seminar provided students with the unique opportunity to interact directly with many experts in the field, supported by Title VI funds from IU’s African Studies Program. Professor Vieira hosted a total of eight guest speakers: Six gave virtual lecturers and two visited in person.

Acclaimed Angolan novelist Ondjaki and Dr. Philip Rothwell of the University of Oxford visited our Department in person. The virtual guest speakers were Dr. Sandra Sousa (University of Central Florida), Dr. Ana Catarina Teixeira (Emory University), Dr. Hilary Owen (University of Oxford and Manchester University), and Dr. Emanuelle Santos (University of Birmingham). All talks were open to the public.

Linguistic Brown Bag Series

We had six Brown Bag presentations in Fall 2023 and a faculty overview of research. The presentations were,

• Estefany Sosa and Dr. Erik Willis: La variación alofónica del segmento fricativo posterior /h/ en el español Cibaeño, República Dominicana
• Jessica Jurado y Benavides: Wh es que - questions in Narinense Andean Spanish Wh-Qs
• Miguel Roman and Rachel Garza: Lleísmo in Bolivia
• Natalie Povilonis: Codeswitching variation: Palindromic switches in Chanka Quechua
• Santi Arróniz: Was That a Question?: Andalusian and Puerto Rican Spanish Listeners and the Perception of Final Fall Terminal Contours (FFTC)
• Jamelyn Wheeler: Yo a mí me gusta: “Topicalized yo” in Peninsular Spanish

Literature and Culture Colloquium

We had three Colloquium presentations in Fall 2023 and four Colloquium presentations and a faculty overview of research in Spring 2024. The presentations were,

• Ali Mohammad Alsmadi: “Capitivity and Resistance in El Poema de Yusuf”
• Alejandro Mejías-López: “On Bad Education and Growing Flowers: Gender, Language, and Memory Politics in Spain and Mexico”
• Steven Wagschal: “Jaguarology: Do Jaguars have a cultural history?”
• Deborah Cohn: “The History (and Current Moment) of Declining Language Enrollments in the U.S. (Or: Our loss, no one’s gain)”
• Marcela Lemos: “Flashes of a Past: Photography, Literature, and the Memory of the Brazilian Military Dictatorship”
• Andrea Carrillo: “Hijos de nadie: Miguel Ángel Tobar and El Payaso as Anomic Mareros in El Niño de Hollywood (Óscar and Juan José Martínez, 2018) and ¡Esto es la mara, jomitos! (Jorge Martínez Mejía, 2016)
• Adam Singh: “Catalan Republican Exiles and Mexico’s Indigenous Past: Catalan Resistance to Franco’s Conquest of Spain”

Sawyer Seminar: Global Slaveries, Fugitivity, and the Afterlives of Unfreedom

During the 2023-24 academic year, Professor Olimpia Rosenthal (Spanish and Portuguese) and Professor Pedro Machado (History) co-led the Sawyer Seminar entitled Global Slaveries, Fugitivity, and the Afterlives of Unfreedom. Generously funded by an external grant from the Mellon Foundation, the Seminar brought together 28 prominent scholars from various academic disciplines and from institutions around the world, including leading historians, geographers, cultural critics, and artists from the United States, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, England, and Canada.

The Seminar was organized around two dialogues and two workshops. In the dialogues, scholars presented short papers on topics related to slavery, racialization, gender, abolition, and the afterlives of unfree labor. In the workshops, scholars and artists shared works-in-progress on themes related to fugitivity, emancipation, marronage, and contemporary memorialization and representations of slavery. The Seminar also included a year-long reading group. All events involved IUB faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students.

In addition to the academic exchanges, Prof. Rosenthal and Prof. Machado co-curated two exhibitions and organized a performance by the afro-Puerto Rican artist Javier Cardona Otero. The first exhibition, at the Lilly Library, featured rare sources that attest to processes of enslavement and forms of violence around the globe and that reflect on the various forms of resistance and contestation to slavery. The second exhibition, at the Process Gallery, featured artistic representations showcasing how histories of slavery, fugitivity, and the ongoing effects of these histories are memorialized and interrogated today in Brazil and South Africa. The performance by Cardona Otero, entitled “taxonomía of a spicy espécimen: a public performance pedagogy,” powerfully reflected on the painful and ongoing legacies of histories of enslavement. 

Over the course of the year, the Sawyer Seminar emphasized the importance of studying the global interconnectedness of histories of slavery and fugitivity in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific worlds, foregrounding how their evolutions shaped processes of racialization and the advancement of capitalism. It also showcased the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary scholarship that considers slavery, unfree labor practices, and fugitivity as complex, interconnected global processes with afterlives that continue to shape discourses of equity and representation today. The timely project and its success attest to the critical importance of academic freedom at Indiana University.

For more information, please visit the Sawyer Seminar’s website.

50 Years: Commemorating Portugal’s April 25, 1974 “Carnation Revolution”

On April 25, 2024, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Institute for European Studies sponsored this event to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Portuguese democracy. Professors Estela Vieira and Patrícia Amaral (Spanish & Portuguese) along with Beatriz Barros (Ph.D student in the Department of Anthropology) and Isabel Almeida (University of Lisbon Visiting Professor in IU’s Department of Comparative Literature) led a discussion on the meaning, legacy, and experience of the symbolic event that transitioned Portugal from a 48-year-long authoritarian regime to a democracy.