Institut Ramon LLull

Four American universities host chairs of Catalan studies this autumn

Language.  30/09/2024

Raül Garrigasait will teach at Stanford University in California, Melissa Moyer at the City University of New York, Sílvia Perpiñán at the University of California-Berkeley, and Yairen Jerez at the University of Havana.




The first chair is the Josep Pla Chair at Stanford University in California by Raül Garrigasait, a doctor in classical philology, writer, translator, editor and current Professor of Greek philology at the Faculty of Philology and Communication of the University of Barcelona. Under the title Classics and Modernity, Garrigasait posits that the history of modern Europe is a story of reappropriation and constant transformation of the ancient Greek and Roman heritage. The course, which concludes in December, focuses on several key moments in this process, mainly relating Germanic and Catalan culture. Thes include the invention of the classical South by Wincklemann and Goethe and the unveiling of Nietzsche's Dionysian irrationality and the emergence of modern Catalan culture through figures such as Joan Maragall, Antoni Gaudí, Salvador Dalí and Carles Riba. This course is available to students, predominantly graduates, from four departments within the university: Iberian and Latin American cultures, comparative literature, Germanics, and classics.

From 21 to 25 October, the Mercè Rodoreda Chair at The City University of New York (CUNY) will host a seminar by Melissa Moyer, Professor of English Philology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, on Sites of Multilingualism, Critical and Ethnographical Approaches. Moyer's research on bilingualism and multilingualism proposes an ethnographic and critical examination of communication in health, tourism, and employment institutions in Catalonia.

From 30 October to 30 November, Sílvia Perpiñán, PhD in Romantic Linguistics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and Professor in the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at Pompeu University, will be conducting a programme of lectures, classes and workshops at the University of California-Berkeley on the topic of bi/multilingualism and the formal linguistic perspective of acquiring second languages, based on her research and expertise in the field. Amongst others, two workshops for doctoral students will present aspects and tools of experimental methodology for studying morphosyntactics and linguistic variation.

In December, the seminar Cultural, Literary and Theoretical Studies for the investigation of the cultural production of the Catalans of Cuba during the twentieth century, by Professor Yairen Jerez Columbié, is scheduled at the University of Havana. A Doctor of Philosophy, Arts and Cultural Studies, Jerez is an assistant lecturer in the Department of Latin American Studies and Intercultural Communication at Trinity College Dublin. Her research lies at the crossroads between cultural studies, communication and interdisciplinary environmental studies. The seminar, which will be part of the postgraduate course programme of the University of Havana, seeks to analyse, question and expand knowledge of vital cultural concepts to understand the links between Catalonia and Cuba, including transculturation, Afro-Cubanism, Catalanism, etc. through the exploration of the cultural contexts of Catalans who migrated to the Caribbean during the 20th century.

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