Garriga Wins BUCH Award
Laurie Garriga, a doctoral student in our Hispanic Language & Literatures program, has won a BU Center for the Humanities Graduate Student Award for her work on the archive ‘in exile’ of writer Juan Ramón Jiménez.
Congratulations, Laurie!
Laurie tells us about her work:
For the past five years, I’ve been studying the displacements of exiled writers, from Europe to the Americas, and the relationship between loss and recovery, memory and forgetting, present in the dispersed archives of their work. My dissertation, Juan Ramón Jiménez and His Migrant Archive: Memory Across Borders, analyses the curious case of the poet’s transatlantic path and the relationship between Spain, United States and my native Puerto Rico, crystalized in his exemplary life.
Jiménez went into permanent exile in 1936, when he and his wife Zenobia Camprubí fled from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the subsequent four-decade dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Jiménez would live in the Caribbean and along the East Coast of the United States (Cuba, Florida, Baltimore and Washington) before settling in Puerto Rico in 1951. In Madrid, Franco’s supporters broke into his residence and ransacked his papers, books and personal items ––his carefully kept life’s work, which it would take many years to recover in part. Jiménez never returned to Spain. He died in Puerto Rico in 1958, working incessantly not only on new literary creations, but also on rewriting and recreating his poems and prose: the task of “reliving” and revising for which he had always depended on an archive.