A collaboration between:
History and Poetry in Renaissance Spain
(Chronicle of a Double Reading)
What happens when poets become historians? While fond of invoking the generic division recommended by Aristotle’s Poetics, Early Modern writers recognized that drawing meaningful lines between the “given” of History and the “made” of Poetry (Literature) was a far more difficult business. Many, indeed, opted to cross the classic theoretical divide frequently in their writing practice, even to inhabit the disputed borderlands. Several celebrated instances of this transgressive symbiosis, which shaped literary agendas in 16th -and 17th- century Spain, hold important implications for the practice of literary and cultural historians in the 21st century, challenging traditional disciplinary boundaries in the humanities.
Learning to read multiple worlds at school and at home: Spanish and English proficiencies for school literacy and intergenerational communication
Across research, international relations, and business sectors, there is an increasing consensus about the need for learners to become proficient in more than one language to better navigate the global and information-based society of the 21st century. In the U.S., where almost 80% of population is estimated to be monolingual, heritage language speakers (those exposed to a language other than English at home) and dual language schools (which educate students in two languages) are seen as key levers to expand the country’s multilingual human capital. While Spanish/English dual language schools are growing in numbers across the U.S., further research is needed to provide schools with pedagogically relevant instruments to adequately track learners’ dual language development. Relatedly, more research is needed to better understand how families can support successful bilingualism and biliteracy at home.
There is no world: global modernisms and cosmopolitan dislocations
This lecture reconceptualizes the ways in which marginal modernists have used and appropriated French culture, against the reductionist and pejorative accusation of Francophilia on the part of the critical tradition. It analyzes the tension between their desire for Paris and the French signifier. With special attention to the writings of Rubén Darío and Jules Supervielle, it underscores their attempts to displace and dislocate the worlds of modernism structured around Paris, and how this opens new interpretative horizons to conceptualize world literature, not as a field or a corpus, but as a critical and aesthetic discourse set on dislocating the world.