The Faculty
Dr. Beatriz Arias-Alvarez was born in Mexico City. She received her BA in Hispanic Language and Literature and her Masters degree in Linguistics from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She then received a scholarship from her university to continue with her doctoral degree in Spanish Philology at the Universidad de Salamanca in Spain. She is currently a researcher in the Institute of Philological Research and a professor in the faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UNAM. She has also worked as a professor of graduate studies in the Communication Sciences program of the National School of Anthropology and History and of the Masters in teaching of the maternal language at the University of Zacatecas. She has been a guest professor at the University of Montreal and at UCSB. Her main area of study is the history of the Spanish language, both in regards to its syntax as well as its phonetics/phonology. She is in charge of a project to document the origin and development of Spanish in Mexico. Several institutions from Mexico, Spain, and the United States are participating in this project. She has published on a variety of subjects. Her interests outside of academia include participation in Amnesty International and Green Peace.
Dr. Robert J. Blake (Ph.D.University of Texas, Austin), Professor of Spanish at UC Davis and Director of the UC Language Consortium, publishes in Spanish linguistics, SLA, and CALL. He has helped author software such as Nuevos Destinos, Tesoros, Spanish Without Walls, and Arabic Without Walls. He was recently inducted into the North American Academy for the Spanish Language.
Dr. Arturo Giráldez was born in Galicia (Spain). He studied at the universities of Santiago de Compostela, Galicia and the Complutense de Madrid. There he finished my studies and wrote his Master’s thesis. He was a high school teacher for eight years. He did one of my doctorates at Amsterdam University (The Netherlands), in History, and the other at UCSB in Spanish Literature. The Universidad Complutense de Madrid awarded him with a “Study Abroad Program” fellowship in order to conduct his studies at UCSB where he completed his doctorate under the guidance of Prof. Avalle-Arce. He has taught in Florida and is now at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, where he is a Professor.
Dr. Julio González-Ruiz is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Spelman College (Atlanta, GA) where he teaches classes of Spanish language and culture, ranging from early-modern Spanish literature to contemporary Spanish fiction (especially, novel and film). Dr. González-Ruiz earned his Ph.D. at the Pennsylvania State University in 2002 with a doctoral dissertation that focused on the relations between race, gender and sexuality as they intersect with the projects of nation-building and imperial expansion in Early Modern Spain. His first book on 17 th -century Spanish playwright Lope de Vega, whose revolutionary concept of theatre questions normative sexualities and transgressive desires in relation to social and literary authority in Baroque Spain, will come out in 2009. In addition, Dr. González-Ruiz has done extensive research, taught courses, delivered talks, and published articles on the subject of the construction of sexual identity in Hispanic literature, from Early-Modern Spanish authors such as María de Zayas, Cervantes, and Lope de Vega to contemporary authors such as Juan Goytisolo and Reinaldo Arenas. Prior to his position at Spelman College, Dr. González-Ruiz taught at Mount Holyoke College, University of Chicago, and University of Tel-Aviv (Israel), among other prestigious institutions. He has also taught graduate courses at UC-Santa Barbara for the Master's Program organized by the Spanish Summer Institute.
Dr. Ricardo Maldonado was born in Mexico City of Spanish and Tarascan heritage. He financed his studies in Hispanic Language and Literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México as a film documentary production assistant. After six years of working as a lexicographer in the Diccionario del español de México, his attraction for the Mexican indigenous languages led him to do an M.A. in Anthropological Linguistics at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia and then a doctorate in Theoretical Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. His work as a research professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México centered around the relationship between cognition and language as reflected in syntax and semantics. In addition to those mentioned above, he must confess two further sins that may be unforgivable: having published a book of poetry and selected poems in literary journals and, even worse, having participated, since its inception, in the Summer Institute on Hispanic Languages and Culture.
Dr. Sara Poot Herrera was born in Merida, in the Mexican state of Yucatan. From there, she emigrated to Jalisco and, after studying at the University of Guadalajara, continued on to Mexico City, where she finished her Doctorate at El Colegio de México. She then came to the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she originally planned to spend only a year. That plan fell through and she has been here ever since. She studies Mexican (New Spanish) literature, with a particular emphasis on the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and on the censorship of the theatre in that era (XVII century). She has also worked with twentieth and twenty-first (what there is of it) century literature. She has received the Woman of the Year prize from the Mexican American Opportunity Foundation (Los Angeles, 1997) and in 2000 received the Antonio Mediz Bolio prize and medal in Merida, Yucatan. She has published books or articles on Sor Juana, on other women writers, and, starting with her first literary love -Juan José Arreola- on writers of the nineteenth throught twenty-first centuries. She respects and admires the work of others and of her own says nothing for she once heard that, “children say what they do, old people, what they have done, and the foolish say what they are going to do.”
Dr. Cristina Rivera Garza was born in Matamoros, Mexico in 1964. She studied sociology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and received a Ph.D. in Latin American history from the University of Houston. She subsequently taught at various universities in the USA and Mexico. After her award-winning literary début, the short story collection »La guerra no importa« (1991; t: War does not matter), she wrote a then unpublished novel – which nevertheless was a finalist for the Premio Juan Rulfo – and the volume of poetry »La más mía« (1998; t: The most mine). The author became well-known with her second novel, »Nadie me verá llorar« (1999; Eng. “No One Will See Me Cry”, 2003). Against the backdrop of dictatorship and revolution in Mexico in the first decades of the twentieth century, it tells the story of Matilda Burgos, a patient at the psychiatric clinic La Castañeda. The short story collection »Ningún reloj cuenta esto« (2002; t: No watch narrates this) appeared at the same time as Rivera Garza’s third novel, »La cresta de Ilión« (2002; t: Ilion’s crest), which once more focuses on madness and death. Rivera Garza most recently published a collection of poems, »Los textos del Yo« (2005; t: Texts of I). She was awarded the Premio José Rubén Romero and the Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. In 2005 she received the Anna Seghers Prize. The author teaches at the Mexican Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Toluca and lives in Metepec.
Dr. Miguel Zugasti was born a handful of years ago in Vidaurre, a small village in Navarra, Spain. He discovered literature as a young man thanks to the novels of Clarín and Galdós (who were succeeded, but not supplanted, by Cervantes, García Márquez, Vallejo, and many others). Since then, he has always wanted to live and work surrounded by great literature. He lives in Pamplona, Spain, where he teaches at the University of Navarra. His position as a professor has permitted him to visit universities in India, Japan, France, the United States (UCSB), Peru, etc. He dedicates his time, often at the expense of a good night’s sleep, to the study of Spanish Golden Age literature, especially Baroque theatre. These studies form the core of his published books and critical articles. He is interested in the connections between Golden Age literature and other parts of the world such as Colonial Spanish-America and East Asia.
