UCLA
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Spring 2004 Newsletter
Contents:
Message from the Chair
Carroll B. Johnson Receives
Distinguished Faculty Research Lectureship
Jesús Torrecilla Receives Distinguished
Teaching Award
Department Graduate Student Suk
Yong Yi-Kang Wins Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award
Professor Merrill
Swain Delivers Matthews Lecture
Graduate Student Conference
"Transformations: Re-imagining Identity"
First Annual Poetry Declamation Contest
Recent Events
Faculty, Student, Staff, and Alumni News
Message from the Chair
Gerardo Luzuriaga
The 2003-2004 academic year is ending on a truly remarkable note for our Department,
as three of our members have recently been honored with very special awards.
Professor Carroll B. Johnson has just been selected as Faculty Research Lecturer
for 2004-2005. Professor Jesús Torrecilla and Teaching Fellow Suk Yong Yi-Kang
have
received Distinguished Teaching awards. For our Department to have three of our own
recognized campus-wide with such distinctions in a single year is really extraordinary.
Our heartfelt congratulations to Carroll, Jesús, and Suk Yong for these great achievements,
as well as our gratitude for their outstanding work! They make us very proud indeed.
This will be my last message as Chair of the UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
My term as head of the Department expires at the end of this Spring quarter, and I have
decided to step aside and pursue other activities. It has been a great privilege and honor
to serve in this capacity and work with such a special group of faculty, teaching
assistants, and staff. My job has been much more rewarding thanks to their collaboration
and support from day one. Professor John Dagenais has been named my successor, effective
July 1st. He is a medievalist of international renown, author of The Ethics of Reading in
Manuscript Culture, among other publications, who I am sure brings to the chairship new
ideas and a lot of energy. With his selection as Chair, the Department will be in very
good hands. I offer my congratulations and support to him as he assumes his new
responsibilities.
These have certainly been demanding times, but also quite satisfying. I leave with the
sense that significant achievements have been realized in the past three years and that
the Department continues to be one of the best in the country. We have an outstanding
faculty, a very talented graduate student body, and a very professional staff. In the
area of public events, we have organized many symposia, conferences, and round tables,
and have brought to campus distinguished visiting faculty and such speakers as Nobel
Prize laureate José Saramago, of Portugal, prize-winning novelist and politician
Sergio Ramírez, of Nicaragua, and the legendary writer Elena Poniatowska,
of Mexico. Our staff
has developed several list-servs for our various types of events and has updated our
website, and now our activities are announced broadly. These efforts have resulted in
larger audiences. Our graduate students have increasingly been involved in presenting
papers (with enhanced financial support from the Department for travel to professional
meetings) and organizing their own conferences. The Department started this year a very
successful “Work in Progress” series, with the participation of our own faculty and
graduate students. All of these activities both demonstrate and stimulate the intellectual
energy of our Department.
From a personal perspective, some of the highlights during my tenure as Chair include:
the hiring of two outstanding young scholars (Michelle Clayton and Anna More); the
promotion of four colleagues to the upper ladder ranks (now full professors Adriana
Bergero, Héctor Calderón, Verónica Cortínez, and Jesús Torrecilla); the visit of the
three above-mentioned writers; the 2002 Conference on Central American literature
(I may be a bit biased here, since I was one of the conference’s conveners); the
creation of the position of Director of Graduate Studies (occupied by Carroll B Johnson);
the revision of the graduate program; the forging of an until now elusive Minor in
Mexican Studies; several joint endeavors with other academic units, such as the Center
for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Latin American Studies Center, the César
Chávez Center, the Department of Comparative Literature, and others; the refurbishing
of our Lydeen Library and the increase of its holdings; the launching of the Work in
Progress series; and the establishment of an advanced study program in Costa Rica,
which complements well our academically and financially thriving summer programs. In a
separate category altogether, shines a very generous donation by Professor Emerita
Shirley Arora, which will be used to provide every year a full fellowship, named after
her, to a deserving graduate student, starting this coming Fall. Also during my watch
the Department underwent its eight-year review, with the participation of a team of
internal and external reviewers, whose report was by and large positive, which is no
mean feat, considering that such reports can be quite critical. Each faculty and staff
member has played a role, one way or another, in the Department’s overall well being,
and I thank all of them for their valuable input.
I would like to conclude by expressing my deepest appreciation to the seven special
individuals that make up our Staff: Heidi Arbisi-Kelm, Ernesto Guerrero, Mary Hoang,
Hilda Peinado, Matt Tyler, and Peter Yi. They all are
extremely efficient and hard working. If the Department runs so smoothly, it is mostly
because of them. My hat is off to their exemplary commitment and dedication to their
work.
My very best wishes to all our readers for an enjoyable summer.
Carroll B. Johnson
Receives Distinguished Faculty Research Lectureship
By Gerardo Luzuriaga
Professor Carroll B. Johnson is one of the greatest authorities on Early Modern
Spain, and his landmark contributions are recognized and celebrated by Hispanists
throughout the world. His outstanding achievements in research and his preeminence
in the field led the Academic Senate to name him Faculty Research Lecturer for the
coming year, one of a selected few among the entire UCLA faculty to be so honored.
He will be officially recognized for this selection during the June 1st Legislative
Assembly of the Academic Senate and he will deliver a public lecture to the university
community next year. The Department of Spanish and Portuguese is very proud that Carroll
has been honored with this exceptional award.
Carroll B. Johnson received his B. A. from UCLA and his doctorate from Harvard,
and has taught at UCLA throughout his entire academic career. He has received a
great many honors and distinctions over several decades, among them, election as
Corresponding Member of the Hispanic Society of America (1979), President of the
Cervantes Society of America (1997-2000), Honorary Fellow of the Hispanic Society
of America (2002, one of only 100 Fellows elected), and Chair of the Division
Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association (1983-1985).
Johnson has written on several of Spanish Golden Age major writers. His first book,
Matías de los Reyes and the Craft of Fiction (University of California Publications
in Modern Philology, 1973), is widely recognized as the definitive work on the Madrid
novelist and playwright's narrative technique. Inside Guzmán de Alfarache (UC Press,
1978) represents the first-ever attempt to explain Mateo Alemán's famous novel by teasing
out the protagonist's unspoken motivations based on the insights of psychoanalysis.
In Madness and Lust: A Psychological Approach to Don Quixote (UC Press, 1983) Johnson
applies the psychoanalytic approach to Cervantine studies for the first time. Prior to
this seminal work, it seems that no one had had the temerity--or the insight--to consider
the man from La Mancha as a sexual being, and the study immediately generated controversy
among scholars.
In his latest book, Cervantes and the Material World (U. Illinois, 2000), Johnson uses
a historicist approach, drawing on such authorities as Marx and Américo Castro and more
recent Continental thinkers (Bartolomé Bennassar, Pierre Bourdieu, Fernand Braudel,
Bernard Vincent, Charles Aubrun, Noël Salomon, ...), as well as his own personal critical
acumen and superb imagination. Particularly noteworthy is Johnson's examination of
women's role in the sociopolitical order of the day, the subject of the second half of
this work. This study of Spain's most famous author has been received with great critical
interest and has revitalized Cervantine studies. Our colleague is currently working on
yet another book, this time on the Morisco culture. He gave us an advance of this study
this past Winter as he inaugurated the Department’s “Work in Progress” series.
Carroll B. Johnson is deservedly praised by his peers for his ground-breaking studies.
Steven Hutchinson (U. Wisconsin, Madison) asserts that in his books Johnson consistently
makes “lucid and fascinating connections nobody has ever made" and that he is "one of the
few American scholars in Early Modern Spanish studies who can converse with people on both
sides of the Atlantic." Hutchinson adds that Johnson’s approaches combine a "theoretical
openness with a historical rigor that no other American Cervantine scholar can even come
close to." His work, according to Michael Gerli (U. Virginia), is "so far ahead of its
time that when it appears, it is deemed idiosyncratic, even peculiar, by prevailing
critical wisdom, only to be resoundingly vindicated over time as having been on the
vanguard of a whole new set of critical principles and hypotheses."
Our colleague has also published a great number of scholarly articles and has presented
many erudite papers at professional conferences, including keynote addresses. He also
has organized a number of major symposia, one of which resulted in a published volume
(Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies, with A. J. Cruz). Equally important events
organized by him include a symposium honoring Salvador de Madariaga (UCLA, 1979), an
international conference on the 4th centenary of Quevedo (UCLA, 1980), the Southern
California Cervantes Symposium (UCLA, 1990), and the "Pacíficas convivencias" symposium
in honor of F. Márquez Villanueva (UCLA, 2002).
Johnson has served our profession in exemplary fashion. As Chair of the Executive
Division of the Modern Language Association and as Vice President and President of the
Cervantes Society of America, he has organized numerous conference sessions and plenary
addresses at professional meetings across North America (for example, Lexington, KY,
1996; Washington, D.C., 1996; Toronto, 1997; San Francisco, 1998). Additionally, for many
years he has held positions on the editorial boards of the most prestigious journals in
his field: Book Review Editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes (1974-78), Associate
Editor of the Journal of Hispanic Philology (1984-1991), and Associate Editor of
Cervantes
(1980-present). Given his preeminence in his field and his outstanding public speaking
abilities, it came as no surprise that when (in 2002) the Modern Language Association
dedicated its weekly National Public Radio program "What's the Word" to the topic of
Don Quixote, our colleague was among a select group of Hispanists invited to participate.
Johnson was featured again in a documentary on the same subject, "Don Quixote: 400
Years on the Road," aired in three segments (summer 2003) on the Canadian Broadcasting
Company program "Ideas." In March 2004 he was asked to work with award winning filmmaker
Carl Byker on a major PBS television series on the Early Modern Spanish Empire as the
first global superpower, which includes the role of writers such as Cervantes.
This note cannot end without at least a passing reference to Johnson’s role as a true
educator and a model for students and scholars alike. One of his peers summed up Johnson’s
performance in this area by asserting that the many doctoral students he has formed and
mentored throughout his career "represent several decades of the best of Golden Age
scholars" (Hutchinson).
Congratulations, Carroll!
Jesús Torrecilla Receives Distinguished Teaching Award
By Gerardo Luzuriaga
This past winter, Professor Jesús Torrecilla received the prestigious UCLA
Distinguished Teaching Award, in acknowledgment of his outstanding contributions as
instructor and mentor at the undergraduate and graduate levels. This prize is given
to only a handful of faculty members every year and is considered a great honor to
both the recipient and his Department. The Department of Spanish and Portuguese is
delighted that yet another of its members has been recognized with this major award.
Having received his Ph. D. from the University of Southern California in 1991,
Jesús Torrecilla taught for several years at Louisiana State University before
joining our Department in 1997 as an Assistant Professor. Shortly thereafter,
he was promoted to Associate Professor and in 2002 he became a Full Professor.
Torrecilla lectures primarily in the area of modern Spanish literature, although
he has taught a wide range of courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels,
including a General Education course on Civilization of Spain and Portugal (M42) and
a graduate course on literary theory and criticism (M201). Torrecilla has also taught
a Fiat Lux seminar –a new type of course designed to expose undergraduate students, in
small groups, to current faculty research- on “Exotic Spain,” the topic of his most
recent book.
Jesús Torrecilla has been and continues to be an enthusiastic supporter of our
Department’s Summer Travel Study programs. He led large groups of undergraduate
students in a four-week long program in Granada, Spain, on two occasions, and last
year he directed a similar program in Puebla, Mexico. Those programs were extremely
successful, due to a great extent to Torrecilla’s special rapport with students.
Torrecilla has the reputation of being a very demanding instructor, and students who
take his classes or do individual studies or write doctoral dissertations under his
direction notice his high standards right away and can expect to work hard. Students
praise him for being meticulously organized, methodologically rigorous, very fair at
grading, and extremely dedicated to his students.
Perhaps a student’s recollection of her experience in Professor Torrecilla’s classes
captures best the quality of his teaching and his relationship with students. This
student wrote: “My first upper division Spanish literature class was the Introduction
to Spanish prose... I was both afraid and unsure of my Spanish skills when I entered
the class, and Professor Torrecilla’s rigorous approach on the first day did nothing to
assuage my fears. However, I soon realized that, although he is a demanding instructor
who desires nothing less than the best from his students, he also supports his students
every step of the way... In the classroom, he is always forthright, yet affable, and
from the experience of being in three of his classes, I also believe that he quickly
earns the respect of most students who enter his classroom.”
It is said in academia that good teaching is quite often strengthened by good research.
There is no doubt that in Jesús Torrecilla’s case his excellent scholarly work benefits
his teaching. A specialist in 19th Century Spanish literature, he is internationally
respected for his contributions in the area of Spanish national identity. He has published
three sole-authored books (España Exótica: La Formación de La Identidad Española Moderna,
2004; El Tiempo y los Márgenes (Europa como utopía y como amenaza en la literatura
Española), 1996; La imitación colectiva: modernidad vs. autenticidad en la literatura
española, 1996) plus an edited volume on La Generación del 98 (2000), another
co-edited
volume on Razón, Tradición y Modernidad: Revisión de la Ilustración Hispánica (1996),
and many articles. He writes with clarity and elegance, and reading his publications
can be both enlightening and entertaining. After all, Jesús is also a prize-winning
writer, with two novels already under his belt (Guía de Los Angeles, 2001, and
Tornados,
1998), and a collection of short stories under way.
Congratulations, Jesús!
Department Graduate Student
Suk Yong Yi-Kang
Wins
Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award
By Hilda Peinado
It’s a long way from South Korea to Argentina. For 7-year old Suk Yong Yi-Kang the
world changed completely when she and her family made the decision to emigrate.
Her father, who’d been part of the Korean government’s special forces, went into
business in Buenos Aires like so many of his countrymen. The adjustment for Yi-Kang,
being so young, was not as difficult as it was for the adults, especially when she had
elementary and secondary school to attend. That’s a cultural immersion right there.
After secondary school Yi-Kang attended medical school at the University of Buenos Aires.
She studied medicine for three years, and during the summers she would come to the US to
learn English.
Medical school turned out not to be the ideal career and Yi-Kang decided instead to
pursue a major in Economics/International Relations at Saddleback College. That was
another big jump from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles. From Saddleback she transferred to
UCLA. Although she thought she was going to continue with economics, she started to take
literature courses in the Spanish department. That did it and there was no turning back.
She graduated with a major in Spanish. She knew then what her ultimate career would be:
professor of literature. In 1998 she applied to graduate school at UCLA, UCI, UC Berkeley.
All accepted her but she opted for UCLA because she knew she wanted to work with
Prof. Verónica Cortínez.
Like many other graduate students who started teaching during the first quarter of
graduate school, she was terrified when she had to teach for the first time.
Fortunately, Sandra Pérez, who would later win the Distinguished TA award, was the TA
Consultant at the time. Yi-Kang learned a lot from her and in the process discovered
her passion for teaching. She had the encouragement of then Lower Division Coordinator
Dr. Susan Schaffer and Dr. Sylvia Sherno, UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese,
and her mother who’d always wanted her to find a career that would allow for a family
life. Yi-Kang became involved in all aspects of Lower Division including web design
for the activities in level 3 and in a service-learning project for Spanish 4. She was
selected as the TA Consultant for 2002-03. Not only did she enjoy teaching language
but also teaching literature in Spanish 120B with Prof. Torrecilla. Winning the
Distinguished TA Award for 2004, is the capstone to her years in Lower Division.
But being in graduate school isn’t all about teaching. Yi-Kang is majoring in
contemporary Spanish American literature and is writing her dissertation under the
direction of Professor Verónica Cortínez. When Yi-Kang was preparing for her Ph.D.
qualifying exams, she had to settle on a dissertation topic first but it was taking
some time. The discovery of her perfect topic came about in a most serendipitous way.
When a fellow student, Jasmina Arsova, was at the University of Nevada (Reno), she met
Edgar Brau, a writer-in-residence there. She invited him to visit UCLA and then
introduced him to Yi-Kang. The introduction prompted Yi-Kang to read several of
his books and she had to concur with Anderson Imbert: here was a major talent in
Argentine literature and yet very little has been written about Brau’s work. Here
was her dissertation topic! Of course, analysis of Brau’s work will necessitate
exploring in depth the themes of violence, psychological and physical torture,
repression, and censorship that have been a part of the tragic history of so many
Latin American countries. In this case, of course, it’s specifically Argentina
Brau writes about. Yi-Kang will soon return to Argentina, her second home country,
this time to do research for her dissertation.
Yi-Kang says she’s blessed with the wonderful things that have happened to her in life.
Most of us would agree that she has a lot to do with it. Yi-Kang is known for her
organization and her incredible timing with things that most don’t think they have
much control over. She met her husband while in line at a bank , well, he worked
there. She “timed” the birth of both her children so as not to interfere with her
teaching or her studies. And it really is her “time” to shine as she is
recognized for her tremendous talent. Things definitely are going well for Suk
Yong now and the future promises to bring continued success.
Professor Merrill
Swain Delivers Matthews Lecture
By Susan Plann
On Friday, May 7, Prof. Merrill Swain of the University of Toronto, Ontario, delivered
the Department of Spanish and Portuguese's annual Lois B. Matthews lecture. Swain, a
Professor in the Modern Language Center at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,
is an internationally recognized authority in second language acquisition and a member
of her university's Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning and the Department
of Linguistics. She is past President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics
(1998-1999), Vice-President of the International Association of Applied Linguistics
(1999-2005), and the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the American
Association for Applied Linguistics' Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award and
the Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers' Le Prix Robert Roy.
Prof. Swain's areas of research include second language test development, communicative
competence, content-based teaching, task-based learning, and collaborative learning.
Swain is the first Matthews Lecturer to speak on a topic in linguistics, and her talk,
which she delivered in the Kerckhoff State Room, was very well attended, drawing more
than seventy people from a number of departments on the UCLA campus and beyond.
Prof. Swain's research, which centers on French immersion programs in Canada, has
important implications for language teachers and researchers everywhere, and perhaps
nowhere more than in Southern California. Her work is of particular significance to a
department like our own, in which the majority of the classes we offer are language
classes—Spanish, Spanish for heritage speakers, and Portuguese—and virtually all of
our graduate students are engaged in language teaching.
During the 1980s Prof. Swain was one of the first linguists to argue that, contrary
to the then-widely-held belief, mere exposure to the target language is not sufficient
to ensure native-like proficiency. Her Output Hypothesis emphasized the need for students
to actively produce the language by speaking as well as writing in order to attain more
native-like command of the second language. Swain's groundbreaking work is regularly
included in graduate linguistics classes in our department.
For her Matthews Lecture Prof. Swain spoke on "A Language Learning Strategy:
Production before Comprehension." Focusing on recent research that explores the
role of collaborative dialogue in second language learning, Swain demonstrated that
dialogue among students provides opportunities for second language learning because
it engages learners in problem-solving and knowledge-building—in this case, the solving
of linguistic problems and the building of knowledge about language. The theoretical
underpinnings of her work are to be found in the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky and
others who maintain that individual mental resources develop from collective behavior.
Her research is also grounded in socio-cultural theory, for instance work by Wertsch
and Stone, who observe that learners produce seemingly appropriate linguistic behavior
before fully comprehending its significance. The observation applies equally to children
mastering their first language and to second language learners, and Swain argues that
for students of a second language, speaking and writing mediate comprehension, thus
advancing the acquisition process. Because we produce before we comprehend, production
becomes an entry point to language learning.
Prof. Swain illustrated her lecture with examples from a task-based experiment she
conducted with several colleagues. In the study in question seventh-grade second
language learners in a French immersion classroom in Canada wrote stories based on
visual or auditory stimulus. Swain analyzed the dialogue students engaged in as they
wrote their stories and the feedback they received while writing; their reflections on
that feedback were related to their posttest performance. Her examples clearly revealed
instances in which second-language production led to comprehension—a phenomenon not
commonly discussed in the current literature on second language learning, and one that
is diametrically opposed to the well-known situation in which comprehension precedes
production.
Prof. Swain's formal lecture was followed by a lively exchange with members of the
audience. The discussion included theoretical questions on language learning as well
as more practical concerns, and some graduate students formulated questions and
observations based on their own experience as teachers of Spanish. A reception at the
close of the presentation allowed faculty and students to engage in further informal
conversation with our speaker, after which graduate students Amy Rell and Jason Rothman
interviewed her for the graduate journal Mester.
On the day preceding her lecture at UCLA, Spanish and Portuguese professors and graduate
students treated Prof. Swain to dinner at a Westwood restaurant; the day of her talk
professors and students also had the opportunity to socialize with her during lunch at
the UCLA Faculty Center. Our distinguished guest's visit culminated in a special dinner
with various faculty and graduate students in attendance. Following the dinner members
of the department of Spanish and Portuguese bid a fond farewell to our first Matthews
Lecturer in linguistics, but not before Prof. Swain had invited graduate students and
faculty alike to visit her at her University in Toronto.
Graduate Student Conference
"Transformations: Re-imagining Identity"
“Transformations: Re-imagining
Identity,” the Spanish & Portuguese Graduate Student Conference was held on April 16,
2004. It had been many years since there was a conference organized by students in the
department; graduate students Iliana Alcántar, Marisol Pérez, Alessandra Santos, and
Melissa Strong Carrillo decided to reintroduce the departmental graduate student
conference tradition. Having founded the Graduate Student Conference Committee in
Spring of 2003, they embarked on a full year’s work to organize the conference.
Their work resulted in a full day of stimulating conference papers, all followed by
intense discussion. Professor Gerardo Luzuriaga graciously opened the conference, and
professors Michelle Clayton, John Dagenais, Beth Marchant, and Claudia Parodi expertly
moderated each panel. Throughout the day panelists engaged their audience, exploring
identity in the Hispanic and Lusophone world through a variety of lenses.
The conference was divided in four panels: Music and Urban Space in Brazil,
Transformation Through Language, Citizenship and Nationality, and Countering Perceptions.
Damian Bacich, Yasmine Beale-Rosano Rivaya, Vanina Eisenhart, Catherine Fountain, Diane
Gunn, Alejandro Lee Chan, Lizy Moromisato and Patricia Villegas-Silva presented. They
should all be very proud of their professional and intellectual work. Graduate students
from UCLA’s Ethnomusicology, Romance Language & Literature, Comparative Literature,
and English departments as well as UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, and USC also presented
commendable papers. The keynote speaker, Dr. Norma Alarcón from UC Berkeley, gave a
heartfelt presentation about her own experiences among the Zapatista women from Chiapas,
Mexico, addressing pressing questions of gender identity vis-à-vis political identity.
Conference participants and attendees continued to discuss the conference at the
reception. The event was well attended by professors from our department and both
UCLA graduate and undergraduate students. The conference was made possible by the
sponsorship and support of the UCLA Graduate Student Association, the UCLA Spanish &
Portuguese Department, and the Spanish & Portuguese Graduate Student Association.
Irene Carranza, local Chicana artist, generously loaned her artwork, which added a
special touch to the Herbert Morris Seminar Room. Last but not least, the conference
would not have taken place without the dedication and kindness of the department’s
staff. Overall, the conference was a resounding success. We hope this will become a
departmental tradition.
First Annual Poetry Declamation Contest
By Tiffany Powell
On Saturday, May 1, 2004 the UCLA
Department of Spanish & Portuguese hosted the First Annual Poetry Declamation Contest,
an outreach event designed to promote Spanish, the arts, and literacy. Forty high school
Spanish students representing nine high schools from the greater Los Angeles community
traveled to UCLA to participate in this event. The students dramatically recited before
a panel of judges two canonical poems - one obligatory and one they chose. The
participants were divided into four categories depending on their mastery of the
language: beginner, intermediate, advanced and heritage speaker. After the panel
of UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese graduate students completed the judging
process, the high school students along with their Spanish teacher, family members and
friends congregated in a large auditorium for a final awards ceremony. Department Chair,
Professor Gerardo Luzuriaga, welcomed everyone, and the keynote speaker, Dr. Sylvia
Sherno, presented a delightful address which showed how poetry is not only still alive
but surrounds us daily. All participants received a certificate of participation and
the top winners of each category received prizes that were generously donated by local
businesses. Before the program ended, the top winners of each category declaimed their
poem one last time for the entire audience. This outreach event, which brought together
many members of the Department, was a lovely activity that everyone enjoyed. We hope to
someday see these students taking Spanish classes here at UCLA!
Recent Events
Lectures and Conferences
“España en África: El imaginario marroquí en la literature y el cine (1909-1939),”
Margarita Pillado, Grinnell College, May 27, 2004.
“Apresentação de Fernando Pessoa: questões fundamentais de sua poética,”
Haquira Osakabe, Institute of Language Studies, UNICAMP, Brazil, May 19, 2004.
Work-in-Progress Series, “The Question of Progress in La voluntad,” David Wood,
UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese graduate student, May 14, 2004.
2004 Matthews Lecture, “Production before Comprehension: A Language Learning
Strategy,” Merrill Swain, University of Toronto, May 7, 2004.
"La 'Princesa Roja': Ascendencia y trascendencia de Elena Poniatowska,"
Michael Schuessler, Barnard College, May 4, 2004.
“Toledo, City of Three Faiths, and the Survival of Mozarabic Culture There,” Ian
Michael, Oxford University, April 28, 2004.
Work in Progress Series, “Agravios, calamidades y venganzas: Una historia del
corrido,” Guillermo Hernández, UCLA, April 9, 2004.
Work in Progress Series, “La Colonia y los estudios postmodernos: los criollos
novohispanos,” Claudia Parodi, UCLA, March 5, 2004.
Screening of BALSEROS, Academy Award Nominee for Best Feature Documentary,
February 24, 2004.
“Gender & Spanish Modernism:”A Fresh, Revisionist Analysis of Spanish Modernism,
Roberta Johnson, University of Kansas, February 13, 2004.
Work in Progress Series, “Cide Hamete Benengeli as Virtual Aljamiado,” Carroll
Johnson, UCLA, January 30, 2004.
Faculty, Student, and Alumni
News
FACULTY
Verónica Cortínez Verónica Cortínez has published “No pasarse de la
raya: Una estética cinematográfica de la transición en El chacotero sentimental,”
Chile después de Pinochet, eds. Titus Heydenreich, Walter Höfler, Roland Spiller,
and Sergio Vergara, Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2004. 181-199. On March 1st,
she invited Gustavo Graef Marino to talk about his film Johnny Cien Pesos in her
class on Chilean Literature and Film. During this year, Professor Cortínez has
served as a member of the Academic Senate Teaching Committee. She has also organized
and moderated the Work in Progress series in our department.
John Dagenais gave the keynote address on "1492 and All That" at the 7th annual
Red River Conference on World Literature, "Crossing Borders, B(l)ending Boundaries,"
at North Dakota State University in Fargo, ND, April 24, 2004. His article
"The Postcolonial Laura" will appear in the September 2004 issue of Modern Language
Quarterly.
Erzsebet Dobos published the article “La magia del agua en el Romancero Gitano”
in Federico García Lorca Et.Cetera Estudios sobre las literaturas hispánicas en honor
de Christian De Paepe, ps.81—87, Leuven, University Press, 2003. At the 14th Annual
Graduate and Professional Symposium on Hispanic and Luso—Brazilan Literature, Language
and Culture, University of Arizona, Tucson, February 19 - 21 2004, she presented "El
agua en la poesía tradicional española y en la obra de Federico García Lorca." She
also presented “Figuras de mulheres nas cantigas de amigo” at the XXVII Symposium on
Portuguese Traditions, UCLA, April 17-18, 2004.
Michael Galant presented “Degree Adverbials in San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec:
Cross-Linguistic Implications” at the Society for the Study of the Indigenous
Languages of the Americas (SSILA) 2004 Annual Meeting, Boston, MA., January 2004.
He also presented “Nature of the Standard of Comparison in San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec
Comparatives,” at the Conference on Oto-Manguean and Oaxacan languages, Berkeley, CA,
March 2004. He has accepted a new position of Assistant Professor at California State
University Dominguez Hills, Department of Foreign Languages where he will be teaching
Spanish and French as well as coordinating the Language Learning Center.
In February, Carroll Johnson inaugurated the new series featuring faculty and
student work in progress, presenting work on Cide Hamete Benengeli's manuscript as
a virtual text of Aljamiado literature. He will present a more polished version as
the keynote address at the fourth annual Chicago Cervantes Symposium at the Newberry
Library on 24 April 2004. This address is titled: "The Virtual Don Quijote: Cide
Hamete Benengeli's Manuscript and Aljamiado Literature." He has contributed an article
called "Some Observations on Cide Hamete Benengeli" to a volume honoring Professor
James A. Parr (UC Riverside), to be published by Bucknell University Press.
Randal Johnson gave the inauguaral lecture, titled “O Cinema Brasileiro
Contemporâneo,” to the 2004 Cinema Studies Program of Faculdade de Tecnologia e Ciência,
February, 2004, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.
Elizabeth Marchant recently accepted the position of Graduate Chair of Women's
Studies for 2004-2005. She presented a paper entitled "Mestizo Identity and Local
Literacy" at the Conference "Local Literacies,” UCLA, March 13, 2004. She is
presently working to arrange the Fall 2004 visit of distinguished Portuguese author
Lídia Jorge to UCLA.
Brian Morris published “Rafael Alberti y su roce con los ismos,” in Luis García
Montero (ed.), Rafael Alberti: El Poema Compartido, Sevilla: Junta de Andalucía,
2003, pp. 51-64 and "Rafael Alberti y el cine," in Julio Neira (ed.), Rafael Alberti
y Teresa León cumplen cien años, Encuentro Internacional 4 y 5 de marzo de 2003.
Santander: Caja Cantabria Obra Social, 2004, pp. 51-68. He presented “Luis Buñel y
los poémas irracionales de Benjamín Péret y Búster Keaton,” in the symposium “Ola
Pekín: Dalí, Lorca, Buñel en la residencia,” at the Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid,
May 19-20, 2004.
Claudia Parodi published “Maravillas del Nuevo mundo: el refinamiento culinario
de los aztecas y Bernal Díaz del Castillo,” Yucatán: Instituto de Cultura de Yucatán,
vol.3, 2003 . In February she went to the presentation of the book En Gustos se comen
géneros, where the previous article is included in Mérida, México. There, she made a
presentation of Michael Schuessler’s book, Elenísima, Ingenio y figura de Elena
Poniatowska. She also published “De la diacronía a la sincronía: contacto de
dialectos en América,” Mexico: UNAM 2003. Her articles “Contacto de dialectos en Los
Angeles: Español salvadoreño y español mexicano,” and “Lengua e identidad de Jesusa
Palancares” were accepted for publication by the University of Sonora and by the
Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey respectively. In February she was invited as guest
speaker by the Graduate Student Association of the University of California, Santa
Barbara, where she talked about language and identity in Hasta no verte Jesús mío by
Elena Poniatowska. In April, she was invited by the Graduate Student Association of
Arizona State University to talk about sociolinguistics and literature. She is conducting
two research projects with graduate students: One on the origins of leismo in Spain and
its absence in Latin America, and the other on a cultural reconstruction of the first
contacts between Spaniards and Indians in the Caribbean. The first project will be
proposed for presentation at the ALFAL conference in 2005. The students that
participated are: Angela Helmer, Kenny Luna and Mariam Saada. The second project is
in progress, with the participation of the members of CECI, Centro de Estudios
Coloniales de Cultura Iberoamericana: Lizy Moromisato, Catherine Fountain, Angela
Helmer and Kenny Luna.
Susan Plann recently signed a contract with Gallaudet University Press for a book,
to be titled Portraits from the Spanish National Deaf-Mute School; 19th Century Deaf
People and their Educators.
Tiffany Powell presented “How Spanish is Taught at UCLA,” at the Faculty Development
Conference, San Pedro High School, San Pedro, CA, Fall 2003.
GRADUATE STUDENTS AND STAFF
Jasmina Arsova presented “The Alchemy of Remedios Varo's Visual Poetry” at a
session of the VII Annual Cultural Encounters Conference “Performing the Margins:
Explorations of Identities & Cultural Expressions” round table entitled “Art,
Censorship and Surrealism,” Tulane University, April 15, 16, 17, 2004. At the XIV
Annual Graduate Student Research Conference, “Thinking Gender,” she presented a paper
entitled “Exploring the Trajectory of Remedios Varo: The Chaos of Gender Metamorphosis,”
for a round table panel entitled “Movement Through Sacred Spaces: Gender, Sexuality, and
Spirituality,” UCLA, March 5, 2004. She also participated on a panel at a book
presentation for Sylvia Sherno’s Weaving the World: the Poetry of Gloria Fuertes,
UCLA, May 23, 2003.
Damian Bacich delivered the paper “Esteemed by Italians and least known by
Spaniards - Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and the Multiple Translations of Leone Ebreo's
Dialoghi d'amore” at the 10th Annual Conference of the Arizona Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies in Tempe, AZ, Feb. 12-14 2004. The theme of the conference was
“Translation, or the Transmission of Culture.” His paper was a condensation of some
of the core findings contained in his doctoral dissertation.
Yasmine Beale-Rosano Rivaya received a Title VI Foreign Area and Language Studies
Fellowship from the Near Eastern Studies Center for the study of Advanced Arabic.
Luis Daltro Schram presented the paper entitled “As Viagens de um guru tropical: a
mediação cultural de Luiz Carlos Maciel,” at 7th Annual Cultural Encounters Conference,
Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, April 16, 2004.
Alejandro Lee Chan presented “De chinos de la China a chinos aplatanados: hibridez
étnica y cultural en lo cubano” at the UCLA Spanish and Portuguese Graduate Student
Conference, “Transformations: Re-imagining Identity,” UCLA, on April 16, 2004.
Vanina Eisenhart presented “Primeira Dama Tropical: A cidade e o corpo feminino na
ficção de Júlia Lopes de Almeida” as a panelist at the XXVII Symposium on Portuguese
Traditions, UCLA, April 17-18, 2004. She also presented “Belle Époque Tropical: A
ambigüidade do momento histórico, político e social no universo de Olavo Bilac, Lima
Barreto e João do Rio” as a panelist at the UCLA Spanish and Portuguese Graduate Student
Conference, “Transformations: Re-Imagining Identity,” UCLA, April 16, 2004.
Carlos Fernández was a co-author of an interview of Dominican-American writer Junot
Díaz for the UC Berkeley graduate student journal Lucero. The title of the interview
is “Junot Díaz: writer, tigre, ghetto nerd, college professor.” It appeared this winter
in volume 14, 2003.
Ernesto Guerrero will have an article published entitled “Do Hispanic Students Need to
Assimilate in Order to Succeed in College?” The article will appear in The Hispanic
Outlook in Higher Education later this summer.
Carolyn Kendrick presented the paper entitled “Maria Firmina Dos Reis' Ursula and
the Origin of the Brazilian Feminine Gothic” at the 2004 Kentucky Foreign Language
Conference, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, April 15-17th, 2004.
Alvaro Molina accepted a position as Assistant Professor in his specialty of Golden
Age Spanish at Mary Washington College, in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Lizy Moromisato presented “Mestizaje y redención en un sermón barroco sobre Santa
Rosa de Lima” at the UCLA Spanish and Portuguese Graduate Student Conference,
“Transformations: Re-imagining Identity,” on April 16, 2004.
Amy Rell and Jason Rothman presented “The Neurobiology of Aptitude and Motivation:
What Teachers Should Know,” at the Hawaii International Conference on the Humanities,
University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, January 8, 2004. They also presented “Is
Universal Grammar involved in L2 Acquisition: Some Evidence from the Acquisition of
Spanish,” at the UC Language Consortium Conference on Theoretical and Pedagogical
Perspectives, UC Santa Cruz, March 24th, 2004 and “An Analysis of Spanglish as a
Source of Identity for Mexican Migrants in the United States,” 7th Annual Cultural
Encounters Conference, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, April 16th, 2004.
Michael Vermy presented the paper, “Exposing the attitudes of native speakers of
Spanish towards non-native speakers of Spanish in Los Angeles, California,” at the
2004 Johns Hopkins University Graduate Student Conference, Johns Hopkins University,
March 2004.
ALUMNI
Gabriel Barreneche presented a paper entitled “Tres tristes traducciones:
Translation and Deconstruction in Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres” at
Florida International University's Conference on Spanish and Latin American Literatures
and Film in Miami, FL, February, 2004.
Andolín Eguzkitza (12/6/1953 – 03/24/2004) Our Department is sad to announce the
untimely death of Dr. Andolín Eguzkitza on March 24, 2004, due to an aneurysm,
at the age of 50, in Bilbao, Spain. Dr. Eguzkitza studied at UCLA in the Romance
Linguistics and Literature Program, with Spanish as his major Romance language.
He received his Ph.D. at UCLA in 1986, with a thesis entitled Topics on the Syntax
of Basque and Romance, under the direction of Spanish and Portuguese Professor Carlos
P. Otero with Professor A. Carlos Quicoli as a committee member. After graduating from
UCLA, Dr. Eguzkitza returned to Spain for teaching appointments first at the Universidad
de Deusto and then at the Universidad del País Vasco (Vitoria), where he taught courses
on general linguistics, semantics, and linguistic typology. In the latter institution,
Dr. Eguzkitza became catedrático in general linguistics and typology in September 2003,
a position that he occupied at the time of his premature death.
Dr. Eguzkitza’s passion was the study of the Basque language and literature, which
he analyzed through an impressive number of books, articles, and newspaper articles.
His many contributions to the field were recognized in many forms. In March 2001, Dr.
Eguzkitza was appointed to Euskaltzaindia (Basque Academy of Letters), and from 1977
to 2002 he held the position of President of the Asociación de Escritores Vascos, among
others. He will continue to live in our collective memory as a jovial, good natured,
and talented scholar who pursued his passion for the study of his native Basque language
to the last day of his life.
Ann Hills was recently promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure
at the University of La Verne. Next year she will begin her term as Chair of the Modern
Languages Department and Director of the Spanish Program. She is currently serving as
ULV's project manager for a consortium proposal which seeks to internationalize career
and pre-professional programs, and will be traveling to Cuba in June to attend a
week-long international faculty seminar in Pinar del Río.
Bridget Kevane recently published the book Latino Literature in America,
Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn. 2003. This book examines works of fiction by
authors such as Julia Alvarez, Rodolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Díaz, Christina
García, Oscar Hijuelos, Judith Ortiz Cofer and Ernesto Quiñonez through an analysis of
cultural identity and dissimilar versions of histories, prominent themes of Latino fiction.
She also published the article, “A Revisionist View of El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega as
a Transcultured Renaissance Writer,” in the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies,
Volume 9, Number 1, June 2003. She also just signed a new book contract under the
direction of Virgil Elizondo at University of Notre Dame.
Dwight Neumann recently published a novel entitled The Destroyer of Innocents.
This unique novel presents the point of view of a Spanish language interpreter during
a death penalty trial. It is available for view in its entirety on the internet at
http://www.iuniverse.com. Neumann works as a
Spanish language interpreter for the Los Angeles
Superior Court in the San Fernando branch. He also teaches Spanish/English interpreting
courses and presently teaches beginning interpreters at Los Angeles Mission College
Community Extension as well as privately for California court certified interpreters.
He has published thirteen interpreting manuals.
Edward F. Stanton is chair of the Department of Hispanic Studies at the
University of Kentucky. He has co-edited a book with his son Daniel, Contemporary
Hispanic Quotations (Greenwood Press, 2003), that has been called “a Latino Bartlett's.”
It contains some 1,000 quotations by notable Hispanics in many fields, including some by
Stanton's major professor at UCLA, Rubén Benítez.
Nataly Tcherepashenets published “Place in Borges´s ‘El Aleph’: The Irony
of Revelation.” Variaciones Borges, 16 (2003): 45-56. She presented “Regresando al
jardín: el laberinto como tema y forma de escritura,” at the J. L. Borges Center for
Studies and Documentation, University of Aarhus, Denmark, March 2004, and “The ´Exotic´
or/and ´the Familiar´: ‘Someone´s Land’ and the Traditions of Literary Utopia,” Carolina
Conference on Romance Literatures, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
March 2004.
Juan Velasco recently received tenure at the University of Santa Clara in the
Department of English and Modern Languages. He teaches courses on contemporary
Latin American and Chicano literature. His most recent book is Las fronteras móviles:
tradición y modernidad en la literatura chicano contemporánea.
