Explore Our Past Spotlights!
Read through our past spotlights below to learn more about the Romance Studies Department and our Faculty. And be sure to check out our current spotlight as well!
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Anita Savo, Portraying Authorship
January 2, 2024Prof. Anita Savo on Her Book Project, Portraying Authorship My book manuscript in progress, Portraying Authorship: Juan Manuel and the Rhetoric of Authority, emerged from my dissertation research on Don Juan Manuel, a fourteenth-century Castilian nobleman, politician, soldier, and writer. Portraying Authorship tells the story of how Juan Manuel convincingly positioned himself as an author, despite lacking what his contemporaries would consider the proper credentials. For medieval readers, an author was someone who lived and wrote in the distant past, such as the venerated writers of ancient Greece and Rome, or the Church fathers from the early days of Christianity. But... [ More ]
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Rodrigo Lopes de Barros, On Filmmaking
January 3, 2022Prof. Rodrigo Lopes de Barros on His Filmmaking. I see filmmaking as the search for an original medium of expression in scholarship. A documentary about a writer can reveal new facets of their creative process. An audiovisual performance of someone’s poetic or fictional work has the potential of giving new understandings to the audience, even generating a different comprehension about the very nature of literature. When transposing literature to the screen, the culture of the written word, so powerful and dominant in certain circles, can be shown to be intertwined with oral traditions and (even) with the body. Movements, dance, and voice... [ More ]
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Dorothy Kelly, The Living Death of Modernity
January 3, 2021Prof. Dorothy Kelly on Her New Book, The Living Death of Modernity My forthcoming book, The Living Death of Modernity, grew out of my classes on nineteenth-century French literature here at BU. I have had the wonderful opportunity to teach some of the greatest classics of the century by Balzac, Baudelaire, and Zola, and even better, to teach them several times, always finding new meaning and beauty in each reading. Several years ago, I noticed something strange in the novels and stories by Balzac and Zola. These authors both famously made clear that they wanted to represent the realities of their time... [ More ]