RS Students Win GRAF Awards
Three Romance Studies doctoral students – Gerardo Cruz, Laurie Garriga, and Edgardo Tormos – have won Graduate Research Abroad Fellowships (GRAF) from the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Congratulations to all three!
Gerardo Cruz is going to Germany to conduct research in the archives at the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin. Cruz’s research examines post-national cosmopolitanism in Latin American literature. His work at the Ibero-American Institute will aid him, in particular, in exploring the writings of the Argentinean author Roberto Arlt.
Laurie Garriga will use her fellowship to travel to Puerto Rico to study the archive in exile of Spanish poet and Nobel laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez. In 1936, Jiménez went into permanent exile, fleeing from the Spanish Civil War. Franco’s supporters broke into Jiménez’s residence in Madrid and ransacked it, leaving Jiménez to spend the remainder of his life reconstructing his records from the fragments he was able to recover. Garriga says that her research ‘focuses on a man and a place, both yearning to recover what was lost’.
Edgardo Tormos plans to explore the archives of the Filmoteca at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the Cineteca Nacionial de México. Tormos’s research project examines the outburst of independent film in the aftermath of the October 2, 1968 massacre of student protesters in Tlatelolco. In the early 20th century, the ruling PRI party had used film in state-sponsored artistic and intellectual endeavors to craft a collective narrative of Mexican identity and culture once the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution had subsided. But after the 1968 massacre, film became an important tool in the hands of civil and student counterculture in their endeavor to challenge PRI imagery and narrative.