OCT 2023
PHOTO: LEVI CROSS
| VOL. IIII
STUDENT NEWS Highlights
Pg. 5
Awards
Pg. 7
Summer Studies
Pg. 9
FACULTY NEWS Appointments
Pg. 11
Achievements
Pg. 12
Publications
Pg. 15
FEATURED EVENTS Summer Fun
Pg. 17
Thank You
Pg. 18
Dear Readers, Welcome to the vibrant world of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Spanish and Portuguese! As the leaves begin to change and the air turns crisp, we are thrilled to embark on a new academic journey together in this enchanting fall semester. Our dedicated faculty, passionate students, and rich cultural experiences await, promising an exciting season of growth and exploration. In this edition of our newsletter, we have a cornucopia of exciting updates, stories, and insights to share with you. So, grab your favorite warm beverage, settle in, and let's dive into the fascinating world of Spanish and Portuguese at UW-Madison.
Censorship, Surveillance, Disinformation Symposium of the Center for Early Modern Studies October 26th and 27th, 2023
ng i om c Up ent Ev
Free and open to the public Memorial Library Room 126
Thursday October 26 3:30: Robin Rider, “Early Modern Sources in Special Collections” 3:45: Jelena Todorovic, “Why and How Love Became the Target of Censorship” 4:30 break 4:45: Kristin Phillips-Court, “Spectacular Eros: Notes on a Censorial Mode” 5:30: Joshua Calhoun, “Remembering to Forget: Technologies and Languages of Erasure”
Friday October 27 9:30: Hannah Marcus (History of Science, Harvard University), “Copernicus, Origanus, and the Licit Circulation of Forbidden Books in Early Modern Italy” 10:45 break 11:00: Grant Nelsestuen, Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities, UW–Madison 11:15: Xinzhi Zhao, “Impartiality in Adam Smith’s Social Scientific Narratives”
12:00-1:30 “Looking Together at Early Modern Sources in Special Collections ”. Location: 984 Memorial Library (Special Collections seminar room) 12:30-1:30 Lunch break 1:30-1:45 All. Discussion of “Looking Together” sources (room 126) 1:45: Pablo Gómez, “Arribadas, Registros, and Palmeos: The Invention of LargeScale State Body Surveillance in the Early Modern Iberian Atlantic” 2:30: Mark Vareschi, “Lockean Persons, Data Bodies: Metaphor and Dataveillance” 3:15 break 3:30: David Castillo, (Romance Languages & Literatures, University of Buffalo), “When the Truth Loses Out: A Cervantine Take on Inflationary Media and Disinformation” 5:00 Reception CEMS thanks the Anonymous Fund for sponsoring this symposium, as well as Special Collections for providing all publicity images. We also thank our co-sponsors in the departments of History, English, French and Italian, Political Science, History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, Spanish and Portuguese, The Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program, and The University of Wisconsin Madison Libraries
Pa Ev st en t
Department Picnic
Amid the serene backdrop of Vilas Park, our annual Fall Picnic brought together students, faculty, and staff for a day filled with camaraderie, abundant sunshine, geese, and delectable arepas courtesy of Caracas Arepas. It was an unforgettable experience .
In the realm of academia, triumph is a culmination of dedication and hard work, and it is with immense pleasure that the department extends its heartfelt congratulations to a group of exceptional students. These students have recently achieved a significant milestone in their academic journey by successfully defending their dissertations, and we couldn't be prouder of their remarkable achievements.
Carlos Ortiz Dion Grosse Emi Frerichs Felipe Moraga
Jorge Hernandez Lasa Luis Vazquez Mariana Oliveira Michelle Dutton
We also wish to offer our warmest congratulations to those outstanding students who have admirably surmounted the challenge of their preliminary examinations. These diligent individuals have shown exceptional dedication and prowess, and we applaud them for their remarkable achievements.
Alex Lara
Emily Koshollek
In various corners of the nation, numerous recent graduates have been fortunate to secure job offers and have now seamlessly transitioned into their inaugural semester as educators. We are elated to have these exceptional intellects representing us and eagerly anticipate the remarkable contributions they will make in the times ahead.
Caitlin Beduhn - UW-Madison lecturer in Spanish Mateo Burner - UW-Madison lecturer in Spanish and Linguistics Michelle Dutton - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Lecturer in Spanish and Portuguese and Assistant Director of the Introductory Spanish program Jorge Hernandez Lasa - Colby College in Maine lecturer in Spanish Felipe Moraga - Madison Area Technical College Instructor in World Languages Mariana Oliveira - University of Florida lecturer in Portuguese and Brazilian culture Carlos Ortiz - Miami University in Ohio Assistant Professor of Spanish Luis Vazquez - UW-Madison lecturer in Spanish
Ph.D. Candidate Gloria J. Morales Osorio researched and curated a book exhibit in Memorial Library with the support of librarian Laura Martin. The exhibit is titled "Archiving Censorship in Latin America. A Peek into Book Banning and State Repression (1959 – 1986)", and it was available on the first floor of Memorial Library from September 4th to October 15th . With the support of the Library staff, Gloria also created a digital exhibit that can be found at this link: https://exhibits.library.wisc.edu/bannedlatinamerica/ Both aim to reflect on the visible and invisible aspects of book censorship in the region, focusing on the cases of Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba in the 20th century. Professor Ellen Sapega translated one of the featured books you can find on the webpage. To launch the exhibit, Special Collections held a "Looking Together" event on September 21th. Librarians Laura Martin, Lisa Wettleson, and Anna Simon, as well as Gloria, selected various printed materials related to censorship, state repression, and the right to read worldwide for people to engage with. Professor Ksenija Bilbija offered an opening talk on the subject.
The Center for the Humanities’ Borghesi-Mellon Workshops program selected the proposal “Archives of the Americas” for funding and support in academic year 2023-2024. This proposal was created by Víctor GoldgelCarballo
(Professor,
Department
of
Spanish
and
Portuguese),
Jorell
Meléndez-Badillo (Assistant Professor, Latin American and Caribbean History), Gloria J. Morales Osorio (PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese), and Addison Nace (PhD Candidate, Design Studies Department at the School of Human Ecology), and it aims to examine the history and current transformations of archival work, with a focus on the Americas, and to explore the material and affective properties of archives in Latin American and Latinx contexts. As part of this workshop, the team organized a conversation and a 'Looking together' event with Dr. Corinna Zeltsman (Princeton University) on October 2nd.
These events fostered discussions on the freedom of the press in
nineteenth-century Mexico, the relationship between authorship and labor, and the importance of thinking about materiality and manufacturing processes when studying the political history of a nation.
Fulbright Recipient JAMIE DE MOYA-COTTER Jamie was recently awarded a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad for his PhD project titled Narrating the Pluriverse: Eco-Storytelling from the Andes and Amazon! This project analyzes the similarities and distinctions between Andean and Amazonian encounters with extractive capitalist ideals of modernity and development. Jamie’s Fulbright DDRA research will take place between Peru and Ecuador, where rap and film have emerged as influential artistic mediums alongside contemporary indigenous youth movements of resistance against Andean and Amazonian extractive development projects. In his research, the artists and works he thinks alongside are deeply entangled with Andean and Amazonian cosmologies and are multi-faceted in their capacity for critique and generative discourse: they both deconstruct extractive capitalist ways of understanding the relationships between humans and nature and also propose alternative life practices and knowledges for living in collaboration with more-than-human worlds. Congratulations again, Jamie, you’ve made the Department of Spanish & Portuguese extremely proud!
Fall ‘22 Fulbright Recipient Update BRANDON GOODALE
For a more in-depth dive into Brandon’s experience and research you can visit his website or read the HERE about his trip to Uruguay. “Having traveled to Uruguay numerous times before my Fulbright, I had already visited most of the historical sites and tourist attractions. I did, however, participate for the first time in the yearly Marcha del Silencio in Montevideo. I also attended a Buitres concert in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a tango music concert performed by Uruguayan musician Héctor Ulises Passarella in Montevideo at the SODRE, and a night club party for Noche de la Nostalgia at Lotus in Montevideo. Besides those events, I visited a few museums but mostly photographed the beautiful architecture of older buildings, cityscapes, well-maintained city plazas, dilapidated buildings, street art, the vast yellow flowered fields of rapeseed, the beautiful addition of eucalyptus plantations which add pleasing height to the mostly flat landscape, the incredible sunsets both in the country and at the beach, the starlit skies above the pitch-black country roads, and the herds of peaceful, free roaming cattle and sheep, all of which my pictures never seemed to do justice.
BRANDON GOODALE
“This summer I presented at the 9th International Conference of Phonology and Morphology (ICPM9) in Seoul, South Korea on June 30, 2023. I have attached a few pictures of the conference and places we visited while there. After the conference we toured the DMZ, the royal palaces, historic neighborhoods, and did some shopping.”
ELIZABETH NEARY
“I attended an aljamiado manuscript course in Madrid. It took place at the Biblioteca Nacional Española and the Fundación de Ramón Menéndez Pidal. The official name of the course was the: Seminario de Estudios Árabo-Románicos organized by Juan Carlos Villaverde Amieva and the Universidad de Oviedo. I am attaching some photos of the manuscripts we looked at and a photo of me and some of the group in front of the BNE.”
PABLO PASTORE
“I was in Buenos Aires for six weeks now, doing archive research for my dissertation. I've been reading newspapers from Buenos Aires circa 1869-1871, taking pictures and collecting information about the southern frontier of Argentina at that time, and trying to find contemporary reviews/comments/anything on Lucio V. Mansilla (author of Una excursión a los indios ranqueles, which will be the focus of at least part of my dissertation).”
PEDRO DE JESUS GONZALES DURAN
“I worked for almost two months with the Wisconsin School of Business as a program mentor and graduate assistant in three different summer camps including the Business Emerging Leaders (BEL) program. It was very exciting and an enriching experience.” Pedro also published a book as an author and as an editor. It's a bilingual edition (Spanish and Portuguese)
A Narrativa Como Reflexo da Realidade Social / La narrativa como reflejo de la realidad social
ESTEFANIA GALINDO
“I worked for almost two months with the Wisconsin School of Business as a program mentor and graduate assistant in three different summer camps including the Business Emerging Leaders (BEL) program. It was very exciting and an enriching experience. I got to Grainger with zero knowledge about business, and now I can say I know a little bit about it. I also went to Montana on vacation for two weeks meanwhile I was teaching Spanish 204 online with our department of Spanish and Portuguese. The students were very engaged, participated all the time and got excellent grades in the end. Now I am looking forward to flying to Colombia to collect data about Colombian Spanish intonation. I will be there for three weeks, working as a project assistant for my advisor Rajiv Rao. I will come back to Madison just in time to start my PhD coursework in fall.”
Faculty Achievements NEW APPOINTMENTS
Fernando Tejedo Department Chair
Ksenija Bilbija Associate Chair
Grant Armstrong Director of Undergraduate Studies
Paola Hernández Director of Graduate Studies
Rajiv Rao Director of the Spanish Language Program
Professor Kata Beilin finished her Fulbright stay in Yucatán, Mexico where she conducted research for her book titled The Return of the Maya Moment: A Culture that Sustains Forests. She was there affiliated with Universidad Intercultural Maya of Quintana Roo and Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán in Mérida. She met amazing people, trees, learned how to divide bee colonies, and began learning how to speak Maya and how to grow milpa. Kata has returned the Spanish version of her film La Tierra Maya: Milpa, Meliponas y la Defensa de la Vida (In English Maya Land: Listening to the Bees) to the Mayan Community in José María Morelos where it was also shown at local schools and beekeeping workshops. In February, this film won Socially Relevant Film Festival in New York. The film has been featured in an article published by Nelson Institute digital magazine Commons. Professor Ksenija Bilbija’s translation from Spanish to Serbian of the novel Elena Sabe by the Argentine author Claudia Piñeiro was published in Belgrade in September 2023. The translation and publication was supported by a grant from Programa Sur 2023. The translation can be found here. Ksenija Bilbija (in collaboration with Serbian author and translator Branko Andjic) finished an anthology of new Spanish American women writers titled Rebels with a Cause. The Anthology (to be published by Laguna, Serbia in 2024) includes a critical introduction and translations of 24 stories by rebels such as Mariana Enríquez, Claudia Hernández, Guadalupe Nettel, Margarita García Robayo, Ariana Harwicz, Alejandra Costamagna, Liliana Blum, Yolanda Arroyo Pizzaro, Ena Lucía Portela, Lina Meruane, Andrea Chapela, among others.
Faculty Achievements Early this semester our very own Mateo Burner went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston for a conference of poster presentations called M100. The conference was held on September 8th-10th to celebrate and address topics related to the life’s work of Dr. Morris Halle, who in his lifetime published important research in Phonology and Morphology, which has been instrumental in modern frameworks like Distributed Morphology. Each day of the conference was led by a panel of renowned linguists that helped dialogue and connect Dr. Halle’s research to the posters presented at the conference. Mateo was in attendance on September 9th for the Morphology panel, where he presented work related to one of the chapters in his dissertation, which he defended in May 2023. M100 was a great experience for networking, but it was also an important venue for learning about current research in theoretical linguistics, and Mateo was glad to represent the Department of Spanish and Portuguese there!
Professor Juan Egea achieved a significant milestone in the fall of 2022 when he was awarded a prestigious grant through the 2022 Fall Research Competition. This grant served as a vital catalyst for his project titled "The Visuality of Disaster: Crisis Images in Contemporary Spain." The funding provided him with the invaluable resources needed to undertake extensive archival research, which unfolded within the historical and cultural tapestry of Madrid, particularly at the renowned Archivo 15M. Over the course of the summer, Professor Egea delved into this archive, unearthing a wealth of insights that promise to shed new light on the visual representation of crises in the contemporary Spanish context. Associate Professor Marcelo Pellegrini, a scholar in Latin American poetry, participated in the 4th Biannual Conference of the International Network for the Study of Lyric (INSL) held at the University of Oslo in Norway between June 6-8. The conference topic was “Poetry. Experience. Attention”. The event brought together over 140 specialists in poetry from all over the world. Professor Pellegrini delivered a paper entitled “Eugenio Montejo: Poetry as an Experience of Heteronymic Synesthesia”, in which he explores the idiosyncratic theory of language developed by Blas Coll, a fictional character created by Montejo, whose aim was to develop a sparser, monosyllabic structure for Spanish in order to have a more direct experience of the world.
Alcalá Galán 2022
Goldgel 2021
Armstrong & MacDonald (eds.) 2021
Goldgel & Domínguez (eds) 2021
Armstrong et al. (eds.) 2021
Hernández 2021
Bilbija 2021
De Ferrari & Siskind (eds.) 2022
Egea 2021
Hernández & Santana 2022
Hutchinson 2020
Rao et al. 2022
Levi Cross (Graduate Student) “I spent 5 weeks of the summer hiking across the islands of São Vicente and Santo Antão in Cabo Verde, visiting with friends and colleagues across Portugal, and touring the regions of Galicia, Asturias, and the Spanish Basque Country. I ended the trip at the San Fermín festival in Pamplona, made it out unscathed after running with the bulls and was ready to teach Portuguese for SIPI (Summer Intensive Portuguese Institute) when I returned!.”
Barbara Rodriguez- Guridi (Instructional Staff) “I went hiking in the north of Spain, French Pyrenees and northwestern Ireland. Nature and hiking are my passion, so I was lucky to be able to explore new areas this summer.”
Kiley Specht (Graduate Student) “My family went to Ireland for the first time to visit relatives on my dad's side that we'd never met before. We learned so much about my Grandpa who left Ireland for the U.S. in 1947. They welcomed us warmly in their home in County Kerry. It was the closest we've felt to our Irish heritage!”
Morgan Zimmer (Graduate Program Manager) “My wonderful mother and I took a delightful road trip to South Dakota this summer! We visited Mount Rushmore, Devil’s Tower, The Bad Lands and Custer State Park! ”
In the spirit of generosity and unity, we wish to convey our heartfelt appreciation to the remarkable individuals who lent their support to the Department of Spanish and Portuguese during the semester's Fill the Hill fundraising event. Furthermore, we hold deep gratitude for the generous contributions we received during the summer, a testament to your unwavering support throughout the year. Your dedication has left an indelible mark, and we hold profound gratitude for your commitment to our department.
Kory Deavers
Ksenija Bilbija
Morgan Zimmer
Karen Francis
Sam Weeks
Tracy Deavers
Alcalá Galán, Mercedes
Egea, Juan
Hutchinson, Steven
Álvarez Oquendo, Saylín
Mercado, Sarli
Medina, Rubén
Ancos García, Pablo
Pellegrini, Marcelo
Rodríguez-Guridi, Bárbara
Armstrong, Grant
Pujol, Eve
Sanchez, Kathryn
Beilin, Katarzyna
Rao, Rajiv
Sapega, Ellen
Bilbija, Ksenija
Ríos-Rodríguez, Jara
Stafford, Catherine
Cerezo Paredes, Alicia
Fondow, Steve
Tejedo-Herrero, Fernando
Close, Glen
Goldgel-Carballo, Víctor
De Ferrari, Guillermina
Hernández, Paola