Faculty Professors, Faculty, Department of Spanish & Portuguese: WCAS

Josef Barton, Ph.D. University of Michigan, Chair, Department of Spanish & Portuguese; Associate Professor, Department of History

Josef Barton is a historian of modern United States and Latin America. His research and teaching deals with the topics of immigration, labor, and environment, in the case of the United States, and in the themes of peasantries and rural communities, in connection with Latin America. The author of Peasants and Strangers: Italians, Romanians,and Slovaks in an American City, 1890-1950 (Harvard University Press, 1975), and recipient of American Council of Learned Societies, NEH, and Fulbright fellowships, he has recently completed a book on capitalism and the persistence of community in Mexico and the Southwest, 1880-1930. His new research takes up two topics, one the experience of rural women in Mexico in the early 20th century, the other East-Central and Southern European immigrants’ health care between 1880 and 1940. He currently serves as director of the Chicago Field Studies Program and as co-director (with Brodwyn Fischer of History and Jorge Coronado of Spanish and Portuguese) of “How Do the Poor Constitute Community?” a Rockefeller Foundation funded project in the Program on Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Nathalie Bouzaglo, Ph.D. New York University, Assistant Professor

Nathalie Bouzaglo holds a PhD in Latin American Literature from New York University. She specializes in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Latin American Literature, with an emphasis on the modern novel/modern narratives of nation building. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled "Illicit Passions: Nation and Adulteration in the turn-of-the century novel," in which she addresses the function of adultery, both as a violation of bourgeois family structure and as adulteration of any homogenous or closed system conception of the nation. She envisions adultery and adulteration as critical concepts around which a cluster of ideas about change, miscegenation and hybridization are gathered in response to the very anxiety that constitutes the projects of nationalism. Her other research interests focuses on the relationship between law, literature and ethics.

Nathalie Bouzaglo arrived to NU in 2006. She has taught courses on Violence and Citizenship in Latin America; The fictions of Borges; and Home, Nostalgia and Crimes of Passion. In the year 2007-2008 she was College Fellow at the Weinberg College of Arts and Science.

Jorge Coronado, Ph.D. Columbia University, Associate Professor

Jorge Coronado specializes in modern Latin American and Andean literatures and cultures. His courses range across the 19th and 20th centuries and draw from various disciplines and cultural practices, such as history, anthropology, political science, music, film, photography, and literature. His book, entitled The Andes Imagined: Indigenismo, Society, and Modernity, will be published in the Illuminations Series at the University of Pittsburgh Press in spring 2009. He has written articles on indigenismo, photography, and the avant-garde. He is currently working on two projects: The Andes Pictured: Photography and Lettered Culture, 1900-50 (under contract at University of Pittsburgh Press), a cultural history of photography in the southern Andes, and an edited volume on representation and the impoverished in Latin America. At Northwestern, he has been active in building the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program.

Gonzalo Diaz-Migoyo, Ph.D. New York University, Professor
Gonzalo Díaz-Migoyo specializes in the literature and culture of Spain and Spanish America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in twentieth-century Hispanic narrative. He is currently working on a project about "morisco" life in Northern Castile.

Darío Fernández-Morera, Ph.D. Harvard University, Associate Professor
Darío Fernández-Morera's main fields are Comparative Literature and Golden Age Spanish literature. He has published books and articles in English and Spanish in the United States, England, and Spain on cultural issues and theory, Cervantes, sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spanish prose and fiction, modern Spanish poetry, the encounter between Europeans and Amerindians, Modernism, and contemporary political events in Latin America. He is the author of American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas, The Lyre and the Oaten Flute: Garcilaso and the Pastoral, Fray Luis: Poesía (ed.), Europe and its Encounter with the Amerindians (ed.) and articles and reviews in journals such as Symposium, History of European Ideas, The European Legacy, Hispanic Review, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Insula and Reason. He has taught humanities courses on Renaissance culture and philosophy; comparative literature courses on criticism, fiction, and poetry in the Comparative Literature Program; and fiction, poetry, drama, and theory in the Spanish and Portuguese department. He has also directed graduate theses on Cervantes and Calderón de la Barca. He has served as consultant and on the editorial boards of scholarly journals and the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a member of the President's National Council on the Humanties.

Lucille Kerr, Ph.D. Yale University, Professor
Lucille Kerr‘s areas of specialization include twentieth-century Latin American literature, with emphasis on narrative fiction, the Boom and post-Boom eras, literary culture since the mid-twentieth century, literary theory, and, most recently, Latin American Jewish literature and culture, especially in the Southern Cone. She is affiliated with the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program and is among the Associated Faculty of the Program in Comparative Literary Studies. Her publications include Suspended Fictions: Reading Novels by Manuel Puig (U of Illinois P) and Reclaiming the Author: Figures and Fictions from Spanish America (Duke UP). Her scholarly articles have appeared in journals such as Criticism, Diacritics, MLN, PMLA, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Journal of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Symposium, and World Literature Today and she is among the contributors to the Latin American Literatures: A Comparative History of Cultural Formations (Oxford UP/FCE/ UFRJ). Her ongoing projects include a collective volume about the Boom era and a web-based Latin American literature-film archive, and her current research, which draws on recent participation in an NEH seminar on “Jewish Buenos Aires,” deals with Argentine Jewish narrative and film in relation to prevailing Boom and post-Boom currents. Her research has been supported by grants from the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science Research Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has served on the Editorial Boards of Hispania, Latin American Literary Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Siglo XX/20th Century, and as Review Editor for Latin American Literary Review. She has directed doctoral research on colonial and nineteenth-century Latin American literature as well as on twentieth-century topics, including studies of Cuban anti-slavery narratives, the grotesco criollo in Argentina, the new historical novel, the journal Mundo Nuevo, testimonial narrative and film, Eva Perón, and mestizaje and multiculturalism in the Americas, among others. She served as department chair in 1999-2002 and 2003-2006.

Elisa Martí-López, Ph.D. New York University, Associate Professor
Elisa Martí-López's field of specialization is Catalan and Spanish literature and culture, with emphasis on the literature and culture of the nineteenth century, literary history and the novel. Her recent research addresses an apparent paradox that underlies the processes of cultural production and consumption in mid-nineteenth-century Europe--nations at different narrative stages became contiguous literary markets. She has challenged prevailing views of the development of the novel in nineteenth-century Spain by demonstrating how translations and imitations of foreign literary models became the foundation for the development of the bourgeois novel in Spain. Her book Borrowed Words: Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Bucknell UP, 2002) shows how the Spanish novel originated in those foreign texts, how the Spanish writers appropriated and borrowed from the original works to create the beginnings of the novel in Spain. She is currently working on a book that questions the metaphorical value assigned to the capital (of a state) and, specifically, to the literature written about and from the capital as privileged referent for the nation. In this study she is also analyzing literary representations of the city in nineteenth-century Spain, especially in the narrative of Narcís Oller. Some of her scholarly work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bulletin Hispanique, Catalan Review, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, Siglo diecinueve, and The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel from 1880 to the Present.

Yarí Pérez Marín, Ph.D. Brown University, Assistant Professor
Yarí Pérez Marín holds a Ph.D in Hispanic Studies from Brown University and specializes in colonial Latin American literature and culture. Her research and teaching interests include Caribbean literature, history of science and film studies. She has received awards from the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and has been a fellow-in-residence at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, RI. In her upcoming book project, Evolving Epistemologies and New World Medical Writings, 1565-1592, she examines texts written in Spain and colonial Mexico in which American nature takes center stage in the ongoing feud between Renaissance humanism and experiential modes of knowledge-production. Her analysis makes a case for the incorporation of scientific writing into current discussions on early modern historiography and literature.

Sacramento Roselló–Martinez, Visiting Professor

PhD candidate (ABD) Georgetown University

Sacramento’s field of study is Medieval Iberian literature. In her dissertation entitled:

Specters of the Reconquest: Sovereignty, Masculinity and Messianism in Fifteenth century

Spanish Historiography, she studies the connections between genre, gender and ideology as

they articulate a national narrative based on a geopolitical and religious unity. Her

dissertation topic touches upon issues in literary criticism such as medievalism, memory,

history and fiction, gender studies and religion. She has an interest in studying those topics in

contemporary Spanish culture, literature and film. Sacramento has teaching and administrative experience in Study Abroad programs in the Universidad de Alicante and Universidad Miguel Hernandez in Spain. Previous to her hiring at Northwestern. Sacramento has taught at Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University and Depauw

University.

Alejandra Uslenghi, Phd New York University, Assistant Professor.

Alejandra holds a Phd in Comparative Literature from New York University (2007) and a MA in Liberal Studies from New School for Social Research (2003). She specializes in nineteenth and twentieth-century Latin American literature, with an emphasis on visual culture. She is working on a book manuscript titled “Images of Modernity: Latin American Culture at Universal Exhibitions” which examines literary discourses of modernization in turn-of-the century Argentina, Mexico and Brazil, concurrently with the development of modern urban culture and the introduction of new technologies for the visual construction of the social. Within this framework, she explores how the differential character of modernity in Latin America can be analyzed through the design, architecture, contents and discourse of universal expositions. She uses Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project as one of her conceptual tools in historicizing how these forms of visualization came to actively shape the discourses on landscape and national identity, subjectivity and technology, spectacle and urban experience in Latin America within this comparative and emerging global context.

She is also currently working on a series of essays on literature and photography from the nineteenth-century to the avant-garde movements in Latin America. Her other research interests include modern aesthetics, comparative modernisms, and postcolonial studies.

Alejandra arrived at NU in 2007 where she has taught courses on literary analysis; Latin American Urban Imaginaries; Modernismo; and contemporary Latin American Visual Culture. In the 2008-2009 academic year she will be a College Fellow at the Weinberg College of Arts and Science.