A New Book by Dorothy Kelly. Before the Stepford Wives: Fantasies of Creating the Ideal Woman
Thomas Edison decides to create a mechanical replica of a woman for his troubled friend, Lord Ewald. This android woman would have all the perfections of Alicia Clary, the woman Ewald loves, with none of her flaws. Using sound recordings, chemically created skin, electricity, and photosculpture, Edison succeeds in crafting an ideal, working Alicia. Ewald […]
Two New Language Departments Replace MFLL
Boston University’s language programs were given a new face, and an injection of new energy, last spring when the Board of Trustees approved the creation of two new departments, Romance Studies (RS) and Modern Languages and Comparative Literature (MLCL), to replace the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures (MFLL). The change takes effect this […]
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 […]
Looking for Roque Dalton: Jim Iffland
Roque Dalton? The son of a wealthy American businessman and a Salvadoran woman of modest social background, educated at an exclusive Jesuit-run school; one of the greatest poets of 20th-century Latin America; political activist jailed on several occasions and murdered in May 1975 by members of a rival faction of the revolutionary organization to which […]
Some Recent Faculty Publications
The Romance Studies bookshelf holds a number of recent works by faculty and graduate students: Jonathan Barnes, who has an important new NSF grant, has published Strength and Weakness at the Interface: Positional Neutralization in Phonetics and Phonology (de Gruyter, 2006). He deals, in his own words, with the “typology and implementation of the positional […]