Romance Studies Names Two Visiting Scholars
The Department of Romance Studies welcomes two Visiting Scholars for 2007-2008, film director Juan Mandelbaum and Mexican literary scholar Gustavo Illades.
Mandelbaum is at work on “Our Disappeared / Nuestros Desaparecidos”, a documentary he describes as “a personal search for the souls of friends and loved ones who were caught in the vise of the military and ‘disappeared’ in 
Argentina during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship.” Past projects have included several hour-long documentaries for PBS on poetry, painting, photography, painting, and music. His production “Dvorak at the Colón”, about the New England Conservatory’s Youth Philharmonic Orchestra’s trip to Latin America was an Emmy Nominee, and won a host of other awards. Over the years, he has been a frequent and generous participant in our Writing in the Americas program.
Gustavo Illades Aguiar, of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalpa, Mexico, will be pursuing “A Poetics of the Voice in 15th to 17th century Spanish Literature.” His project studies the phenomenon of orality particularly in the 15th-century masterpiece La Celestina and in Don Quijote. In examining orality, he draws on sources ranging from Catholic artes 
praedicandi to the “natural philosophy” of the Renaissance to early modern forms of linguistics. Illades is the author of books on Cervantes’s El cautivo; on La Celestina; on the newspaper Regeneración; and of dozens of studies on early modern Spanish literature. He is co-editor, with James Iffland, of El Quijote desde América, proceedings of the Cervantes symposium in Puebla in 2005.
Other recent Visiting Scholars have included Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov, who gave a memorable presentation about his opera Ainadamar, as produced by Peter Sellars, and noted Mexican literary critic Guillermo Sheridan (Spring 2007), who worked on several new books, and discussed his essays, criticism and biography with our graduate students.