The Ampersand

Reviewed by Laëtitia Saint-Loubert for Reading in Translation

The Department of Romance Languages & Literatures (RLL) at Washington University in St. Louis invites applicants for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Global Hispanophone Studies to begin in the fall semester of 2024.

Professor Tabea Alexa Linhard discussed her new book with The Ampersand

Celebrated yearly in March, the International Francophonie Day (Journée Internationale de la Francophonie) is a worldwide celebration that reunites francophones to celebrate French language and francophone cultures. This year, we reflect on the role of time in shaping the francophonie ; the French language has changed and continues to change to reflect the enormous diversity of francophone communities in all continents around the globe using the language for everything from everyday communication to writing scientific reports and groundbreaking literature.

Award-winning films by contemporary Latin American directors

The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis invites applications for a full-time lecturer in French.

Nine multiyear clusters and five yearlong programmatic grants bring together faculty across all seven schools to collaborate on new transdisciplinary research.

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, faculty members share recipes that they will include at their dinners. 

Arts & Science has announced the second cohort of internal seed grant recipients, Prof. Ignacio Infante among them

A midcentury surge of schoolteachers, trained as agents of rural progress, brought modern education to even the most remote areas of the Andean provinces of Peru. Faculty Fellow Javier García Liendo offers a preview of his book in progress, “The Children of Indigenismo: Schoolteachers and the Making of Popular Modernity in Peru.”

In a new book, Miguel Valerio uncovers the history of Afro-Mexican festival performances in colonial Mexico.

Washington University in St. Louis, Romance Languages and Literatures Department is hiring for an Assistant Professor of French.

As leaders of the Office of Graduate Studies, Sophia Hayes and William Acree guide new efforts to support graduate students in Arts & Sciences.

Our PhD Candidates Jonatán Martín Gómez and Patricio Sullivan edited a volume on science fiction and technological imaginaries in the 21st-century narrative in Spanish with Albatros Ediciones.

The Performing Arts Department (PAD) and RLL invite applications for an Associate or Full Professor in the area of Latinx Performance Studies.

The grant will provide scholarships for the five-week exchange program between Washington University and Pasteur Hospital in Nice.

Professor Acree will be a faculty marshal at graduate school commencement.

Two new publications by Prof. Moraña, Professor of Spanish and Program Director of Latin American Studies and William H. Gass Professor in Arts and Sciences

This booklet tells the story of bringing the Hostile Terrain 94 exhibit to our city of St. Louis. Just as the exhibit itself is a memorial for those who have lost their lives unnecessarily in the U.S.-México borderlands, this booklet is a memorial to the work of communities who fight for justice and human dignity in our world today. We hope that this document inspires the continuation of such work long after the exhibit itself is no longer in St. Louis.

RLL Faculty and Students participate in the Center for Humanities Poetry Exercises, Life/Lines.

Join the the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures for Francophone Week, March 20th-26th, 2021.

The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Latin American Studies Program congratulates Professor Mabel Moraña latest publication, Liquid Borders migration as resistance with Routledge.

The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures congratulates Professor Sherberg on the publication of his book, The Decameron fourth day in perspective with the University of Toronto Press.

PhD candidate Olivia Lott was named as a finalist for a prominent literary award, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. In this Q&A, Lott talks about the process of bringing ‘Katabasis’ to new audiences, about her reaction to the PEN shout-out, and for her recommendations of additional must-read translated poetry books.

The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures congratulates Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature Tili Boon Cuillé on the publication of her new book, Divining Nature: Aesthetics of Enchantment in Enlightenment France with Stanford University Press.

The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures congratulates Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature Ignacio Infante on his selection as one of Emerson’s 2020 Excellence in Teaching Award recipients. The Emerson Excellence in Teaching Awards Program, now in its 31st year, recognizes approximately 100 educators in the St. Louis metropolitan area annually for their leadership in and passion for teaching, their contributions to student learning, and their knowledge and creativity.

The department extends a huge congratulations to Professor of Italian Rebecca Messbarger, who is the recipient of a Rome Prize fellowship in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies from the American Academy in Rome (AAR).

The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Latin American Studies Program congratulates Professor Mabel Moraña on the publication of her new book, Philosophy and Criticism in Latin America: From Mariátegui to Sloterdijk, as part of the Cambria Latin American Literatures and Cultures Series with Cambria Press.

On June 4, 2020, the governor of Virginia ordered the removal of Richmond’s monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee, amidst demonstrations across the country against police brutality and systemic racism. His announcement provided a renewed momentum, among racial justice activists, to demand the elimination of all public symbols of white supremacy. Other cities across the nation soon followed suit, ordering the dismantling of Confederate statues, even as protesters, in many places, took the lead in toppling these monuments.

It is our distinct pleasure to announce that a jury composed by Agnes Lugo-Ortiz (University of Chicago), Shelley Garrigan (NC State University), and Michel Gobat (University of Pittsburgh) have selected two wonderful new monographs to receive the LASA 2020-BEST BOOK AWARD IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

How was social distance observed (if at all) during previous pandemics? Turns out there's quite a precedent not just for staying away for your neighbors, but also for the idea of "quaranteaming" you might have heard about. CNN talked to Rebecca Messbarger, a professor of Italian and founding director of the Medical Humanities program at Washington University in St. Louis about social distancing from the Black Plague until now. The parts about the different ways people deal with distance still ring true.

Please join the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in congratulating Professor Ignacio Infante on the publication of his new book, a groundbreaking translation of Vicente Huidobro’s Temblor del cielo, available now.

Giovanni Boccaccio’s masterpiece, the “Decameron,” is set on the outskirts of Florence in 1348. His protagonists have retreated to the countryside in the wake of the Black Death, which is decimating their city both mortally and socially. The book offers important lessons as we confront the global threat of Coronavirus.

When a plague swept 14th-century Florence, killing more than half the city’s population, wealthy Italians turned to social distancing. One small group’s retreat from a stricken city to a deserted villa became the backdrop for the classic novel “The Decameron.” That novel is just one of the texts Rebecca Messbarger teaches in her Disease, Madness and Death Italian Style course at Washington University. But it has sudden resonance, she says — and relevance she never anticipated when she began teaching it a year ago.

Researchers and students engaging with the U.S.’s second-largest language are ignored in our universities — and in ‘The Chronicle’

Sitting down in his office lined with thousands of books and a new Keurig, Professor Ignacio Sánchez Prado, who teaches Mexican cinema, literature and culture at Washington University, divulged his life’s story, his work over the years which culminated in his appointment to the Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress.

In her course “Disease, Madness, and Death Italian Style,” Rebecca Messbarger, professor of ltalian and founding director of the Medical Humanities Program at Washington University, takes students through seven centuries of Italian culture, beginning with The Decameron and the plague of 1348.

‘American Dirt’ gets Mexico very wrong. It’s the latest in a long trend.

Interview with Faculty Fellow Akiko Tsuchiya

Please join us in congratulating Professor of French Harriet Stone on the publication of her new book, Crowning Glories: Netherlandish Realism and the French Imagination during the Reign of Louis XIV.

The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures congratulates Professor Ignacio Sánchez Prado on his recent installation as the Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities.

Swashbuckling tales of valiant gauchos roaming Argentina and Uruguay were nineteenth-century bestsellers. But when these stories jumped from the page to the circus stage and beyond, their cultural, economic, and political influence revolutionized popular culture and daily life.

Elzbieta Sklodowska has co-edited with Mabel Cuesta (University of Houston) Lecturas atentas. Una visita desde la ficción y la crítica a veinte narradoras cubanas contemporáneas, which showcases narrative works of contemporary Cuban women authors, both on the island and in the diaspora, accompanied by in-depth critical readings of these texts.

The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures congratulates Professor of Italian Rebecca Messbarger on the upcoming film based on her book, The Lady Anatomist, which will premiere in Germany on November 3, 2019. The Lady Anatomist details the life of Anna Morandi, one of the most acclaimed anatomical sculptors of the Enlightenment. 

The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures congratulates Professor of Spanish Akiko Tsuchiya on the publication of her new book, Unsettling Colonialism: Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-Century Global Hispanic World, by SUNY Press.

The Sigma Delta Pi chapter Beta Omega Initiation Ceremony took place on Wednesday, May 1, and was a real success.

Thanks to the extensive efforts of Professor Seth Graebner, Daria Carson-Dussan, and Cassie Brand, Olin Library has recently purchased the Pascal Pia Collection of French literature. Named after the pseudonym of poet and literary critic Pierre Durand (1903-1979), this major collection of rare works includes 1000 items in French literature and criticism published between 1800 and 1977 and acquired by Pia. The collection includes, among other works, a significant amount of unique Surrealist ephemera.

Professor William (Billy) Acree received the Graduate Student Senate’s 2019 Outstanding Faculty Mentor award. The GSS Outstanding Faculty & Staff Awards are given out annually to recognize faculty and staff members who “make significant contributions to the graduate student experience.”

The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures congratulates Javier García-Liendo on his promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure.

The Department congratulates Assistant Professor of Spanish William Acree, who has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship for his project, entitled, “The Creole Circus and the Making of a Theatergoing Public in Uruguay and Argentina, 1860-1910.”

The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures congratulates Associate Professor of French Julie Singer on the publication of her book, Representing Mental Illness in Late Medieval France. Machines, Madness, Metaphor.

In the 1880s, a new kind of performance became the craze in Argentina and Uruguay. These wild "Creole dramas" glorified country life and the occasionally violent exploits of gauchos*, or Argentinian cowboys. In addition to being hugely fun to watch, the stories appealed to audiences experiencing rapid modernization and waves of immigration.