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Professor Surwillo teaches courses on Iberian literature, with an emphasis on nineteenth-century Spanish theater. Her research encompasses the questions of property, modernity and the individual as they are manifested by literary works, especially dramatic literature, dealing with colonial slavery, abolition and Spanish citizenship.

Surwillo is the author of The Stages of Property: Copyrighting Theatre in Spain (Toronto 2007), an analysis of the development of copyright and authorship in nineteenth-century Spain and the impact of intellectual property on theater. She is currently writing a book on depictions of slave traders in modern Spanish literature.

Professor Jorge Ruffinelli (Uruguay), a disciple of Angel Rama at the University of Uruguay, followed him as Director of the literary section of the seminal Uruguayan weekly Marcha in 1968. In 1973 he was Adjunct Professor of the Latin American literature program (directed by Noé Jitrik) at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1974 he emigrated to México, where he was appointed Director of the Centro de Investigaciones Lingüístico-Literarias at the Universidad Veracruzana, a position he held for for twelve years. At the Universidad Veracruzana he was also Professor in the school of Letters, and collaborated in all the major cultural journals and newspapers of the Latin American continent. In 1986 he was appointed Full Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford. In Mexico he founded and directed the literary journal Texto crítico for twelve years. A member of various international editorial boards, in the United States he has directed the journal Nuevo texto crítico since 1987.

He has published twenty books of literary and cultural criticism and more than five hundred articles, critical notes and reviews in journals throughout the world. A recognized authority on Onetti, García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, and Latin American literary history, during the nineties his critical work has centered on Latin American cinema. In 1993 he filmed a documentary on Augusto Monterroso for which he interviewed major Mexican writers and critics. He is completing the first Encyclopedia of Latin American Cinema, for which he has written around two thousand articles on feature films from and about Latin America. His current work also includes a book of interpretation and survey of the most recent Spanish American prose published by writers born after 1968, a project that analyzes the work, marketing, and reception of over more than fifty authors (Ana Solari, Milagros Socorro, Karla Suarez, Mayra Santos, David Toscana, Rodrigo Fresan, Juan Forn, Martin Kohan, Jorge Vopli, among others). His teaching centers on the intersection of the interests above and cultural politics.

Professional Activities

At Stanford University, he has been Department Chair (1990-91, 1997), and Director of the Center of Latin American Studies (1994, 1997-1998), as well as a member of numerous university and interdepartmental committees. Throughout the years he has been a Jury Member in several international literary prizes and film Festivals: Marcha (Uruguay); Casa de las Américas (La Habana, Cuba); Premio Internacional Juan Rulfo (Guadalajara, Mexico); Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano (La Habana, Cuba); Festival Internacional de San Sebastian-Donostia (Pais Vasco, Espana), Festival Internacional de Trieste (Italia).

Professor Resina specializes in modern European literatures and cultures with an emphasis on the Spanish and Catalan traditions. He is Director of the Catalan Observatory at Stanford and serves as Director of the Iberian Studies Program, housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Professor Resina is most recently the author of Del Hispanismo a los Estudios Ibéricos. Una propuesta federativa para el ámbito cultural. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2009. In this book he lays out the rationale for the overcoming of Hispanic Studies by a new discipline of Iberian Studies by contending that the field's response to the crisis of the Humanities should not lie either in the retrenchment into the national philological traditions or in a vague cultural studies deprived of evaluative principles and oblivious of cultural history. Another recent publication is Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image (Stanford UP, 2008). This book traces the development of Barcelona's modern image through texts that foreground key social and historical issues. It begins with Barcelona's "coming of age" in the 1888 Universal Exposition and focuses on the first major narrative work of modern Catalan literature, La febre d'or. Positing an inextricable link between literature and modernity, Resina establishes a literary framework for the evolution of the image of Barcelona's modernity through the 1980s, when the consciousness of modernity took on an ironic circularity. The book ends with a highly critical view on the post-Olympic period, arguing that in the early 21st century municipal politics has exhausted the so-called Barcelona model and the city has entered an era that is largely inconsistent with the forces that shaped its modern identity. 

He has also published extensively in specialized journals, such as PMLA, MLN, New Literary History, and Modern Language Quarterly, and has contributed to a large number critical volumes. He has held teaching positions at Cornell University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Northwestern University and received awards such as the Alexander von Humboldt and the Fullbright fellowship.

Héctor Hoyos (Ph.D. Romance Studies, Cornell 2008) is an assistant professor of Latin American literature and culture at Stanford University. He was born in Bogotá, where he studied philosophy and literature at the Universidad de los Andes. Hoyos’s research areas include visual culture and critical theory, as well as comparative and philosophical approaches to literature. His work has appeared in several venues, among them Comparative Literature Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Chasqui, and Revista Iberoamericana. His book manuscripts Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel (Columbia UP, 2014) and El deber de la travesura: César Aira y la crítica cultural are forthcoming. The former is the first monographic, theoretical study of Latin American novelistic representations of globalization of its kind.The latter examines a cross-section of the Argentine author's vast oeuvre from the vantage point of cultural critique.

Hoyos chairs Cultural Synchronization and Disjuncture, a multidisciplinary forum for contemporary cultural theory at the crossroads of Latin Americanism and comparatism. He is a Delegate Assembly Representative for the Division Executive Committee on 20th Century Latin American Literature at the MLA, as well as a board member and Secretary for the Colombianists Association. In 2012-2013, he will be a faculty fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.

His radio interview on Roberto Bolaño, hosted by Robert Harrison on Entitled Opinions, can be listened here.