Carmen E. Lamas is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Virginia. Her books include The Latino Continuum and the Nineteenth-Century Americas: Literature, Translation, and Historiography (Oxford 2021) and Irene Albar. Novela cubana (1885, 1886), por Eusebio Guiteras. Edición facsímil (Editorial Calambur 2023). Her work has appeared in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Latin American Research Review, Latino Studies, Oxford Bibliographies, Early American Literature and in the edited volumes The Latino Nineteenth Century and the Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature.

She is a co-founding editor of the journal Pasados: Recovering History, Imagining Latinidad. She is also on the Advisory Board of Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, the Editorial Board of J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanist; and is a co-founder of the Latina/o Studies Association, an academic organization that brings together scholars, students, and activists in the study of Latinx concerns.

During her summer 2024 residency at the Espacio de Culturas (KJCC)/Faculty Resource Network, Carmen E. Lamas collaborated with Janet Bunde, University Archivist Special Collections, to access university records and manuscript collections related to university life in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. Her project focused on nineteenth-century Spanish-language professors and their time at the University of the City of New York (UCNY), the original name of NYU. She researched how they were hired, their
working conditions, the students they taught, the textbooks they used and/or composed, and their lives at UCNY. Navigating various archival sources (Council Minutes, Chancellor Records, Faculty Minutes, Commencement Announcements, and Course Bulletins, among others), Lamas confirmed the dates that each of the Spanish-language professors taught at UCNY, how much they were paid, and the important role given to the Modern Languages by the early visionaries of the university. The place of Spanish in the curriculum is very strong at the founding of the University and is listed as integral to the undergraduate degree in 1830, as the founding members of what would be NYU met and documented the type of institution they wished to build.

A handwritten summary of the course of instruction dated September 12, 1832, as the first academic year of NYU commences, stressed the need for immediate appointments for instruction in Modern Languages clarifying that they have deemed this step the more important, as it is well known that many of our young men have invested much valuable time in fruitless efforts to acquire these languages, to whom it much be of importance to know where competent and able instructions may be found.

In 1867 the Council resolved to endow three professorship, one of which is in Spanish.

Adding to the work of such renown scholars as Aquilino Sánchez Pérez, Mar Vilar García, Miguel Angel Esparza Torres, and Hans-Josef Niderehe, Lamas larger project recovers the lives and textual footprints of these important Spanish pedagogues. But it centrally addresses the content of their Spanish-language grammars, textbooks, and readers (libros de lectura), combing through the decisions they made regarding which literary excerpts (from Spanish plays and novels) to introduce to English-language learners in their pedagogical materials as examples or for translation practice. She investigates these choices, first, to show how these decisions made these pedagogues integral to the development of nineteenth-century US literature and historiography. Second, since these textbooks were simultaneously used by Spanish-speaking parents who accessed these resources to ensure their children would retain their native language, the project provides a glimpse into how Spaniards in New York City linguistically and culturally educated
their children. The use of these textbooks by English- and Spanish-language speakers thus reveals a temporal continuum of language learning for both second-language learners and heritage speakers up to the present day. The role of Spanish pedagogues at NYU and in Spanish-language learning in the city is central to that continuum. The archival evidence Lamas collected during her time at the Espacio de Culturas (KJCC)/FRN is the foundation for her more extended study on the lives and times of these Spanish and Spanish-language pedagogues living and teaching Spanish in New York City in the nineteenth century at New York University.

Dr. Lamas gives a special thanks to Janet Bunde, Dr. Jordana Mendelson, and Autumn Bush (NYU FRN) for their invaluable assistance and support.