Nicolás Fernández-Medina comes to BU
Prof. Nicolás Fernández-Medina, of Penn State University, will be joining the Romance Studies Department in January 2023 as Full Professor of Spanish and Department Chair. He will be visiting the department during fall term to familiarize himself with the department and with CAS.
Prof. Fernández-Medina writes that his teaching interests “range across genres and periods and include the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the history of medicine, liberal political thought in Europe, the fin de siglo, decadentism, women’s literature, the Avant-garde, and philosophy. I also work on post-Civil War Spanish literature, and, in particular, its turn toward existential phenomenology. His classes have covered, among other subjects, “Liberty and Liberalism,” “Romanticism,” “The City as Text: Theorizing Urban Landscapes,” “The Dilemma of Modernity in Spain,” “Changing the Subject: Literature in Italy and Spain 1880-1914,” “The Spanish Avant-garde,” “Decadentism, Eroticism, and the Diseased Imagination,” and “The Spanish Civil War and its Aftermath.”
Prof. Fernández-Medina is the co-director of the Iberian Modernist Studies Forum whose interdisciplinary symposia, lecture series, graduate seminars, research workshops, reading groups, and salons, have provided “a collaborative structure within which to explore the socio-historical, cultural, and aesthetic shifts that shaped Spain and Italy during the Modernist period.”
Prof. Fernández-Medina has received the Institute of Arts and Humanities Resident Scholar Grant (2012-2013), the Richard Rorty Fellowship from the Benjamin Franklin Institute at the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares (2010) and the Team-Teaching Grant and Challenge Grant from Penn State’s Institute of Arts and Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities (2008). He was awarded Stanford University’s distinguished Centennial Teaching Award in 2007 and in 2006. In 2005, he participated in events commemorating the 25th Anniversary of the Príncipe de Asturias Awards in Oviedo, Spain.