Graduate Students
Bryan Betancur
Jamie Billings
Rafael Castillo Bejarano
David Colbert is a Ph.D. candidate. After receiving his B.A. in
Spanish from Columbia University in 1999, David worked as a language
teacher and journalist. He received his M.A. in Hispanic Studies from
Brown in 2009. His field of research is 20th- and 21st- century
peninsular narrative, with a specialty in literature of the
peripheries, especially of the Basque Country. His research interests
include Basque film, historical memory, nations and nationalism, and
group identity. David is currently writing his doctoral dissertation,
“Memory from the Peripheries: Narrative Constructions of History in
Contemporary Spanish, Basque, Catalan, and Galician Novels,” under the
direction of Enric Bou.
Polina Decker
Julia Garner has a BA from Bowdoin College, where she wrote an honors thesis on political perspectives and narrative form in four novels by Mario Vargas Llosa. Her area of interest is twentieth-century Latin American literature.
Carmen Granda just finished her Master’s degree in Spanish literature with Middlebury College’s program in Madrid. In 2005-2006, she received a Diploma of Spanish Language and Culture from Universidad Complutense in Madrid. In 2005, she graduated with a BA in French and music, Magna Cum Laude, from Middlebury College. Her love for Spain has sparked a passion for its literature, with the Golden Age taking a special place in her heart.
Álvaro Hernández-Sandoval
Chad Leahy (A.M. Brown University; B.A., Mus.B. Boston University) specializes in Golden Age Spanish Literature, with secondary interests in the Colonial and Medieval periods. He has articles published or forthcoming in several peer-reviewed journals, including Cervantes, Anuario Lope de Vega, Romance Notes, and Revista de Literatura Medieval. His dissertation, under the direction of Antonio Carreño, studies representations of Jerusalem in texts of 17th-century Spain. Chad currently teaches as Visiting Instructor of Spanish at Villanova University.
Arturo Márquez-Gómez. Psicólogo egresado de la Universidad de Chile, con estudios de Postgrado en Teoría de Género y Sociedad en la Universidad Academia Humanismo Cristiano. Se desempeñó desde el año 2001 como investigador en la Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) sede Chile. Es coautor del libro "Puertas adentro. Mujeres, vulnerabilidades y riesgo frente al VIH/SIDA" (2006) y coeditor de "Varones: entre lo público y la intimidad" (2004) . Cursó su Maestría en Español en Middlebury College en Vermont y sus áreas de interés abarcan los temas sobre sexualidad, poder e identidad en la novela hispanoamericana.
Kyle James Matthews. BSOF (Spanish and Music, honors, magna cum laude, Indiana University, 2003); A.M. (Hispanic Studies, Brown University, 2008). His research interests include modern Latin American literature, with a particular eye for Mexican narrative and essay from all eras. These interests include the intersection of history and memory in the historiographical enterprise, Jewish Latin American authors, and modern critical theory. His thesis research centers around the New Historical Novel in Mexico, focusing on the ways bodies are deployed to formulate and question conceptions of the nation.
Andrea Nate. B.A., Magna Cum Laude, with Honors in Spanish and Women’s Studies, The College of New Jersey, 2006, M.A., Spanish Literature, Middlebury College School in Spain, 2007. In 2004-2005 she studied Spanish Philology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid through the Universidades norteamericanas reunidas program. She taught at a bilingual elementary school in Madrid as a Cultural Ambassador, through the Spanish Consulate´s program for English Language Assistants. Currently a second-year Ph.D. student, Andrea’s trans-Mediterranean interests encompass the literature of Medieval Iberia and North Africa. Fascinated by the convivencia of the Iberian Middle Ages, she has spent several years in Spain as well as a significant amount of time in Morocco studying the Arabic and Berber languages and cultures. Other research and colloquium papers at Brown have explored Castilian medieval memory and representation in Golden Age drama, women monarchs, royal lineages, women and love in Alfonsine Castilla, and 15th century romance and misogyny present in Early Modern texts.
Ezio Neyra
José Ramón Ortiz Castillo. Licenciado en letras españolas especializado en marketing (Tec de Monterrey, 2006). At Brown, his research explores the problems of Modernity and its poetics in México, as well as the image of the Hero and the narratives of the heroic in Medieval Spanish Literature and Contemporary Mexican Pop Culture, Folklore and Literature. Currently, the main focus of Jose Ramon's work includes analyses of extravagant Castilian Hagiography from the 14th and 15th centuries, non Catholic Sainthood in Mexico, Recreational Horror, and Lucha Libre. In the summer of 2009, José Ramón was granted a fellowship by the Tinker Foundation to begin his research on his dissertation topic: extravagant sainthood from the Middle Ages to Modern Mexico. That year he was also invited as a research scholar by the Instituto de Iberoamérica from the Universidad de Salamanca.
María del Mar Patrón Vázquez. Honors B.A. in Literature from the Universidad de las Americas-Puebla (Mexico). Her B.A. thesis dealt with the literary portraiture as a reflection of the portrait writer’s conception of the author as a subject of creation. She is interested in studying the status reshaping of the critic and the fictional writer in contemporary Latin-American societies. Other interests include the intellectual history of Latin America of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries; Latin American contemporary literature and essay writing; and Inter-American contemporary relations in the literary, critical, cinema, popular, and cultural fields.
María Pizarro Prada. Licenciada en Filología Hispánica en la Universidad de Salamanca (España). Actualmente en proceso de redacción de su tesis doctoral sobre las Obras reunidas del escritor mexicano Alejandro Rossi para la misma universidad. En Brown cursa su tercer año de Ph.D. Interesada en Literatura Latinoamericana y española de siglo XX, en especial cuento y "formas breves".
Carmen Saucedo. B.A. (Linguistics and Literature, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2000); Diploma (Librarian and Information Sciences, PUCP, 2000); M.A. (Hispanic Studies, Brown University, 2006). Her area of interest is twentieth-century Latin American Narrative. Her Dissertation intends to relate Peruvian literary texts that refer to the period of political violence in Peru (1980-1992) with contemporary ethical theory, and representations of difference and alterity. Other interests include the role and impact that disciplines such as Literature play in a national life, and traces of colonial thoughts in modern mentality and interaction in a society.
Sara Snider
Ingrid Thommel Tobar
Felipe Valencia, B.A. (Universidad Complutense de Madrid ’06), A.M. (Brown University '10): studies Spanish Golden Age literature with an emphasis on lyrical poetry, melancholy, poetics, the pastoral, tragedy, and medicine at the turn of the seventeenth century, and is interested in authors such as Góngora, the early Cervantes, Huarte, Herrera, Torre, and Arguijo. Other interests include Colonial Latin American literature, particularly the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Juan Rodríguez Freyle.
Charlotte Whittle
Daniella Wittern A.M. (Hispanic Studies, Brown University, 2008); B.A. (summa cum laude with honors in Spanish, Creative Writing, Hamilton College, 2002). In her senior year at Hamilton, Daniella received a fellowship to spend a semester in Spain writing a bilingual novel entitled Entre lenguas. Now an advanced PhD candidate (degree expected for May of 2011) in Hispanic Studies at Brown University, her dissertation, titled "Words that Act, Literature that Speaks: Diamela Eltit's Narrative Performances," explores the performances within the work of contemporary Chilean artist and author Diamela Eltit, as her narrative crosses dictatorship, the transition to democracy, and the most recent earthquake. Daniella's master's thesis explored the artificiality of language in the dialogue Fernando Vallejo maintains with the picaresque genre in La virgen de los sicarios. Her teaching and research interests trace the intersections of contemporary film, literature, and performance, as they span the Americas, and explore issues of urban space, cultural/gender identities, trauma and memory studies, and border studies.
Carlos Yushimito del Valle