Portuguese

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.

Professor Librandi-Rocha specializes in Modern Brazilian Literature within a theoretical and comparative framework.  

Her first book, Maranhão-Manhattan. Ensaios de Literatura Brasileira (2009) examines the deployment of meta-fiction in the works of Joaquim de Sousândrade, Murilo Mendes, Paulo Leminski, and João Guimarães Rosa as an existential and political quest; and the critical theories of Luiz Costa Lima, João Adolfo Hansen, and Augusto and Haroldo de Campos as a defense of experimentalism in fiction. 

Her next book-length project is titled Writing by Ear. The Senses of World LIterature in South America. Going beyond the oral/writing divide, the book re-describes the novels of major Brazilian novelists -- Machado de Assis, Graciliano Ramos, Clarice Lispector and João Guimarães Rosa --  in relation to the sense of hearing and to the issue of listening to literature, understood as a performatic text of resonances. It concludes opening to a transamerican discussion with a reading of “El Etnógrafo,” by Jorge Luis Borges, analyzed as another answer to the Lévi-Strauss's “Writing lesson,”  and in contrast to Vargas Llosa, "El Hablador", and with an analysis of the Amerindian contemporary expressions of the Guaranis in the borders of Brazil and Paraguay. The book joins a theoretical current that has been examining the importance of voice in written texts (from Latin American literary criticism to post-colonial and feminist studies), and it seeks to contribute to recent debates concerning the ontology of literature and the anthropology of fiction.  

Librandi-Rocha edited and introduced the book Poemas-Vida (2008), and co-edited three recent special issues - “Literatura e Juizo de Valor”(2011), “Literatura e Viagem” (2010), and “História do Livro e da Leitura” (2009) -  of Floema, a journal of Literary Theory and History edited in Brazil.

Member of the Executive Committee of the American Portuguese Studies Association, she has also begun to serve as Book Review Editor of the association's journal, ellipsis. 

For a selection of writings, please click on the following link: http://stanford.academia.edu/Mar%C3%ADliaLibrandiRocha

Vincent Barletta is Associate Professor of Iberian and Latin American cultures and Research Associate at Stanford's Europe Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. In 2013-14, he will be a full-time faculty fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. He teaches late medieval and early modern Iberian literatures, and his research focuses on Renaissance Portugal, empire and language, pastoral literature, and anthropological approaches to literature.

Vincent Barletta's most recent book is Dreams of Waking: An Anthology of Iberian Lyric Poetry, 1400-1700 (U of Chicago P, 2013), co-edited and translated with Mark L. Bajus and Cici Malik. Before this, he authored Death in Babylon: Alexander the Great and Iberian Empire in the Muslim Orient (U of Chicago P, 2010). He is also the author of Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain (U of Minnesota P, 2005) and editor/translator of Granadan Morisco Francisco Núñez Muley's A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of the City and Kingdom of Granada (U of Chicago P, 2007). His current book project, Rhythm: A Poetics of Patience, examines specific theories of rhythm in writers ranging from Aeschylus to Luís de Camões.

Before joining the Stanford faculty in 2007, Vincent Barletta taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the recipient of the La corónica International Book Award (2007) for Covert Gestures, and he has received fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and the Del Amo Foundation. He received an MA and PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures, both from UCLA, and he also carried out two years of post-doctoral study in linguistic anthropology at UCLA.