Juan Ramón Jiménez Series
Juan Ramón Jiménez Distinguished Lectures and Seminars Series
The Juan Ramón Jiménez Distinguished Lectures and Seminars Series has since 2007 served as a forum for exceptional visiting writers and scholars whose work is centered on language, literature, philosophy, and the history of ideas in the context of Iberia and Latin America.
Work threaded with the quintessential topic of Jimenez’s opus: “life, nature and the power of language and its inner life.” The invited writers/scholars-in-residence deliver a public lecture in English and offer two graduate-level workshops/seminars in Spanish on texts provided in advance to participants. Graduate students are encouraged to engage with the visitors during open office hours held throughout their residency.
For more information the public is invited to contact the Spanish Department.
Past Speakers
Juan Villoro
Writer, Mexico City
2015
Juan Villoro is one of Mexico’s most important living authors and its finest contemporary literary humorist. As a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and chronicler, his work addresses a broad array of topics with insight, dark humor, and irony: canonical Mexican literature; the Zapatista insurrection in Chiapas; the legacy of Mexico’s Cristero War; the intersections of popular television and fiction; and the social and cultural function of spectator sports. Villoro has won a number of awards, including the prestigious Herralde Prize for his novel El testigo (2004). He has published more than seventeen books, including the novels El disparo de argón (1991), Materias dispuestas (1997), and Arrecife (2012); the short-story collections El mariscal de campo (1978), Albercas (1985), La casa pierde (1999), and Los culpables (2008); the collections of chronicles Tiempo transcurrido (1986), Las once de la tribu (1995), and Hay vida en la tierra (2012); essay collections, including De eso se trata (2008). His first complete work in English translation, The Guilty, was published this year.
Dr. Ángel Gómez Moreno
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
2014
A distinguished Medieval and Renaissance scholar, Prof. Gómez Moreno has been a member of the Medieval Research Group of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, named Professor per Chiara fama at the University of L’Aquila, Italy, and visiting professor at Geneva University, Switzerland. He has published 30 books and countless articles. Among his most recent publications are: Poesías completas: El márques de Santillana (2003), Claves hagiográficas de la literatura española del Cantar de Mio Cid a Cervantes (2008, MLA Book Prize) and Breve historia del medievalismo hispánico (2011).
Dr. Raúl Antelo
Universidad Federal de Santa Catarina, Brasil
2013
Prof. Antelo is the Chair of the Brazilian Literature Department at the Federal University in Santa Catarina, Brazil and is a prominent comparativist in the Hispanic-Luso cultural context. A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, he has made numerous contributions across disciplines, mainly in literary theory, comparative literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. Prof. Antelo has been a visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, Yale University, Duke University, and the Universiteit Leiden in the Netherlands. He has authored Teoria da nação (1998) and Transgressão e modernidade (2001) among other books, and edited the Obra completa of Oliverio Girondo (1999), A ronda das Américas by Jorge Amado (2001), as well as Antonio Candido y los estudios latinoamericanos (2002).
Dr. Concepción Company Company
Universidad Autónoma de México, México
2012
A prominent linguist and medievalist, Prof. Company has authored eight books, edited more than twenty volumes, and written more than a hundred scholarly articles. Her work includes: Linguistic Documents of New Spain - Central Highlands (1994), Historic Spanish Lexicon of Mexico (2000), and four volumes of the indispensable Historical Syntax of the Spanish Language (2009-2014). Since 1990, she codirects the academic journal Medievalia. She is a Member of the Mexican Academy of Language and is the recipient of the National Award for Young Scholars (1992) and the National Linguistics Prize "Wigberto Jiménez Moreno" (1995).
Dr. Ricardo Foster
Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
2007, 2009, 2011
A public intellectual in Argentina, Professor Foster is the author of twelve books and numerous essays on philosophy and literature, Argentinian and Latin American politics, and Jewish history and thought. He is a professor of history and philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires and a member of the cabinet in the area of Culture and National Thought. He has taught at universities in Brazil, United States, Spain, Israel, Germany, the Czech Republic, Uruguay, and Chile. His recent titles include: El laberinto de las voces argentinas (2008), Walter Benjamin, una introducción (2009), Los hermeneutas de la noche. De Walter Benjamin a Paul Celan (2009), La anomalía (2010), and El litigio por la democracia (2011).