Foreign Language Deptartment Presents Five-Part Series on “Hispanic World”
November 10, 2009
During the month of October, Emmanuel College's Foreign Language Department, with the support of the Spanish Consulate, organized a five-part conference series titled "Art, History, Politics and the Beginning of Modernity in the Hispanic World."
The first presentation of the series, given by Emmanuel College Associate Professor of Art Cynthia Fowler, was titled "Losing Hope: Goya and Romanticism in Spain," and provided an overview of Goya's artistic production, focusing on his position as one of the most important Romantic painters of the early 19th century. Professor and Chair of Romance Languages and Literature at Harvard University Luis Fernández Cifuentes also presented "Goya and Money," discussing numerous letters written by Goya with compulsive focus on money and monetary transactions.
As the third speaker of the five-part series, Emmanuel Assistant Professor of History Javier Marion discussed "Loyalism, Liberalism, and Revolutions: The Cádiz Court and Latin American Independence," exploring the relationship between the court and Spanish America, the dissemination of republican-liberalism, and its imprint on Latin America's independence movements.
The following week, Boston University Professor of Spanish and Chair of Romance Studies Christopher Maurer presented "Lorca, Buñuel, Dali: From Metaphor to Collage," discussing visual analogies to the metaphor and verbal analogies to collage in the works of Lorca, Buñuel, Dali.
Concluding the series, Emmanuel Associate Professor of History Melanie Murphy presented "Saramago's Journeys," which focused on the territorial, temporal and ideological journeys of the characters in the works of the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese novelist José Saramago.
"All of these lectures have captured the audience's imagination and attention," said Assistant Professor of Foreign Languages José Ignacio Alvarez-Fernández, who organized the series. "I would say that one of the most interesting aspects of the lecture series was its interdisciplinary quality, a quality that allowed the public to have a look at the emergence of modernity and its discontent."
