Thursday, April 1, 2:00 p.m. EST
This event was in English and Spanish.

The book we celebrated, Spanish Culture from Romanticism to the Present: Structures of Feeling, brings together in one place 24 essays published over Jo Labanyi’s career, which she was invited to contribute to the “Selected Essays” series of Legenda, the imprint of the British Modern Humanities Research Association. The essays cover drama, poetry, fiction, political writing, painting, photography, cinema, and memory studies, loosely held together by Raymond Williams’ understanding of culture as a barometer of historical change. Joining Professor Labanyi in this discussion were several scholars whose work has developed in dialogue with hers, and whose insights on this publication will bring out the many ways her scholarship has impacted the field of Peninsular Studies, as well as the future directions her work continues to inspire.

Discussants: Pura Fernández (CSIC, Madrid), Alejandra Rosenberg Navarro (NYU), Sarah Thomas (Brown University)

Legenda was offering attendees of the event a 50% discount on the book by emailing: graham.nelson@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk

Bios:

Jo Labanyi came to NYU in 2006 after a career in the UK. She is the founder of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, of which she remains deputy editor, and of the Journal of Romance Studies. She was elected to the British Academy in 2005. A specialist in the cultural history of modern Spain, her fields of research are literature, film, gender studies, popular culture, memory studies, and the history of emotions. She has co-edited and co-authored volumes that rethink the field of Spanish cultural history—as in the co-edited Companion to Spanish Cinema (Blackwell, 2012) and Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History (Vanderbilt UP, 2016; Spanish translation 2018); and the co-authored Cultural History of Modern Literatures in Spain (Polity Press, forthcoming 2022). She is the author of Spanish Literature (2010), part of Oxford UP’s Very Short Introduction series. As Professor Emerita at NYU, she will work on two projects: an oral history of cinema-going in 1940s and 1950s Spain, and a monograph on 1940s Spanish cinema entitled Reading Cinema under Dictatorship.

Pura Fernández is a Professor in the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (CSIC) in Madrid, and has previously held the position of Subdirector and Head of the Department of Spanish Literature. She is the General Director of Editorial CSIC. Her research centers on modern and contemporary Spanish culture, with special interest in the history of literature and publishing, especially as they relate to the experiences of women as writers, editors, and readers in the Hispanic world. She has led numerous research groups, including “Redes Transatlánticas: Practicas editoriales de la Re(d)pública Iberoamericana.” Among her numerous publications, which include volumes on Eduardo López Bago and Ramón Gómez de la Serna, is a volume which she co-edited with Jo Labanyi and Elena Delgado on Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History (18th Century to the Present) (Vanderbilt UP, 2016).

Alejandra Rosenberg Navarro is a Ph.D. Candidate at NYU, and is fortunate to have Professor Labanyi as part of her dissertation committee. Her research focuses on visual cultures and the emergence of new subjectivities within the twentieth-century Spanish- and Portuguese- speaking Atlantic. Her dissertation, Transatlantic Lenses: Gender and Amateur Film in Iberia and Latin America (1910–1940), examines amateur films made by women in Iberia and Latin America, specifically in Mexico, Brazil, Spain, and Portugal. Alejandra is also Project Coordinator for El Taller@KJCC (2020_–_2021) and Editorial Assistant for the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. In 2021, Alejandra was awarded the Elaine Brody Fellowship for the Humanities.

Sarah Thomas is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at Brown University. She received her PhD from NYU, where she wrote her thesis under Professor Labanyi’s direction. Her research is primarily concerned with the cinema, literature, and visual culture of modern and contemporary Spain, with special interest in the representation of subjectivity, gender, temporality, and space. She is the author of Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition (University of Toronto Press, 2019) and is currently working on a monograph on the cinema of Carlos Saura as well as a project on gendered representations of suffering and subjectivity in modern Spanish cultural production. Her essays have appeared and are forthcoming in in boundary 2, Hispanic Review, and Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, among other journals and edited volumes.