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 publis
hed 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 neutralization of contrasts in vowel inventories.” The book’s purpose is “to account in a meaningful way for regularities in that typology, and to elucidate, on the basis of these phenomena, the nature of the relationship between phonetics and phonology more generally.”
Alicia Borinsky has published a new work of fiction, Golpes Bajos: Instantáneas (Low Blows: Snapshots) translated by the author and Cola Franzen, with an introduction by Michael Wood. The publisher, University Press of Wisconsin, writes that “Borinsky provides unique glimpses into the lives of the city’s inhabitants: its businessmen and tango dancers, politicians and torturers, triumphant divas and discarded children—a gallery of characters from a broad spectrum of contemporary Argentine society. She portrays a world of violence, corruption, love, and betrayal.”
Elizabeth Goldsmith continued her research on women’s epistolary writing, publishing Lettres de femmes, texts inédits et oubliés du XVIe au XVIIIe siècles (co-edited with Colette Winn; Paris, Champion, 2005). A review of the book notes that it demonstrates the fundamental contribution of women to the development of the epistolary art, brings together a selection of letters which have been forgotten since their first publication, and discovers the epistolary voice of women who have had a prominent place in the political and religious polemics of their times. “En ce sens, cet ouvrage constitue un témoignage important de l’histoire culturelle et littéraire, susceptible d’intéresser l’amateur éclairé aussi bien que l’érudit.”
Edited by James Iffland (Professor of Spanish) and Gustavo
Illades (Visiting Scholar in Romance Studies, 2007-2008), the volume El Quijote desde América (ICSH/Universidad Autónoma de Puebla/Colegio de México, 2006) brings together the proceedings of the Quijote symposium held in Puebla in February 2005, with essays by (among others), David Boruchoff, Daniel Eisenberg, Mary Gaylord, Frank Loveland, Adrienne L. Martin, James Parr, Harry Sieber, and Alan Smith.
Pedro Lasarte, recently promoted to Professor, has produced a thorough study of the society of 17th-century Lima and its tradition of satirical poetry: Lima Satirizada (1598-1698): Mateo Rosas de Oquendo) y Juan del Valle y 
Caviedes (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2006).In his detailed readings of these two poets, Lasarte brings out a number of underlying themes: on the one hand, “the usurpation of power” by wealthy local rulers and by Spaniards blinded to Peruvian realities by their acceptance of commonplaces about the New World; on the other, the “misgivings of a Spanish society that, at the end of the 17th Century, was beginning to re-evaluate its complex, problematic relationship” with its Colonial empire.
Adela Pineda, recently promoted to Associate Professor, has written a ground-breaking study of the role of literary magazines in configuring fin-de-siècle “modernismo”: Geopolíticas de la cultura finisecular en 
Buenos Aires, París y México: las revistas literarias y el modernismo (Pittsburgh, 2006). In a recent review, Christopher Conway writes: “Pineda allows us to better understand the specific ways in which the idea of the so-called ‘new spirit’ of Modernismo emerged in uneven and contradictory ways through transatlantic dialogue… The construct of Modernismo that emerges in Pineda’s study is not that of a stable school of thought or a corpus of ideas but a series of distinct local conversations taking place through different literary magazines in separate national contexts.”
In Galdós y la imaginación mitológica (Madrid, Cátedra, 2005) 
Alan Smith, undertakes the first systematic, full-length study of the great Spanish novelist’s ideas on religion and myth, placing them in relation to the “mythological imagination” of nineteenth-century and European realism. Smith is now at work on an edition of Galdós’s letters, and has undertaken the editorship of the journal Anales Galdosianos, which is now published in our Department.
Over the past two years several faculty members have published translations of their previous work; for example, Odile Cazenave, 
Afrique sur Seine: A New Generation of African Writers in Paris (Lexington Books, Lanham, MD, 2005); and Jeffrey Mehlman, Emigrés à New York: Les intellectuels français à Manhattan 1940-1944 (Paris, Albin Michel, 2005). Romance Studies chair Christopher Maurer published an English translation of the correspondence of Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí: Sebastian’s Arrows: Letters and Mementos (Chicago: Swan Isle Press, 2005)
Two students in the graduate program in Spanish, Carlos Villacorta y Enrique 
Bernales published in Mexico, Los relojes se han roto, muestra de poesía peruana de los Noventa, a wide-ranging anthology of Peruvian poetry of the 1990s.