Silvia Bermúdez
Professor Bermudez’ areas of research and teaching are Contemporary Peninsular Literatures, Transatlantic Studies, Latin America (especially Peru) and Spain’s stateless nations (especially Galicia).  Her current work pays particular attention to how Spain’s new geopolitical position places this multilingual nation-state at the crossroads of the complex geographies and imagined communities that result from the circulation of peoples and cultures from Latin America and Africa.

She is presently working on a book manuscript, “Rocking the Boat: The Rhythms of Immigration in Spanish Pop Music, 1984-2004” that addresses songs, pop groups and songwriters that have turned their attention to the materiality of immigration, arguing that a) it is in Spanish music where immigration is first given testimony, and other cultural productions such as literature or film will engage this reality later on; and b) the songs bear witness to the specific effects that border crossing and transnational movements have on immigrants reaching the Spanish shores.

Professor Bermudez’ two published books Las dinámicas del deseo: subjetividad y lenguaje en la poesía española contemporánea (1997)and La esfinge de la escritura: la poesía ética de Blanca Varela (2005) demonstrate that she is equally conversant with Peninsular and Latin American literary and cultural production and that she re-evaluates poetry as a relevant genre of study by focusing on its enduring social role on the public sphere. 

Professor João Camilo dos Santos is Docteur-ès-Lettres, having earned his Doctorat d’Etat in France in 1983. Before coming to the University of California, Santa Barbara he was a professor at the Universities of Oslo, Rennes, Aix-en-Provence and Grenoble. He is a professor of Portuguese and Brazilian literatures and of Comparative Literature (narrative, short stories, XIXth century adultery novel) at University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published two books and an extensive number of scholarly articles on diverse literary subjects. His research publications focus chiefly on nineteenth and twentieth centuries novelists and poets, and on "neo-realismo". In his research Professor Camilo dos Santos has as a rule given particular attention to literary theory and criticism, focusing on technical and stylistics aspects of narrative, poetry, and drama. He is responsible for the publication series of the Center for Portuguese Studies and the founder and editor of its yearly journal, Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies (1994). He is the author of two books of essays: Carlos de Oliveira et le Roman (Paris, Fundação Gulbenkian,1987); Os Malefícios da Literatura, do Amor e da Civilização, Ensaios sobre Camilo Castelo Branco (Lisboa, Edições Fenda, 1992). He organized two international colloquia at University of California, Santa Barbara, on Camilo Castelo Branco and on the Portuguese and the Pacific. He is the author of a novel, Retrato Breve de J.B. (Porto, Editora Paisagem, 1975; 2nd edition, Edições Fenda, Lisboa, 2006), of  a volume of short stories, O Grande Frémito da Paixão (Edições Fenda, Lisboa, 2002), and of a volume of short plays, Uma Sonata de Brahms e Outros Diálogos (Capital do Teatro, Covilhã, 1998), some of which have been produced several times in Portugal. He has also authored eleven volumes of poetry and published numerous articles, poems, short-stories, and plays, in books, journals, literary magazines. Some of his poems have been included in anthologies of poetry and published in translation in French and Spanish.

Professor Checa’s research interests are mostly related to the literature and the culture of the Spanish Golden Age, although they also touch the fields of Colonial and Medieval studies. Throughout his career he has published books and articles dealing with a variety on genres (narrative prose, lyric and epic poetry, the Golden Age comedia, didactic and historical prose) and focusing on topics such as the literary uses of space, the relations between poetry and the visual arts in the early modern period, Baroque as a cultural and interdisciplinary notion, the concepts of experience and representation in 16th and 17th literature, self-fashioning in the early modern period.  He has recently ventured in the area of textual criticism. In addition, his current work explores the ambivalent ways through which some authors (such as Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Alonso de Ercilla) incorporate in their texts certain ideological and historical issues; among them we find the justifications of war in relation to the increasing power of the State as well as the problem of rebellion—with particular attention to the Morisco minority.  In addition to the above-mentioned authors, his publications include studies on Baltasar Gracián, Francisco Delicado, Teresa de Jesús, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Hernán Cortés, etc.
He has published the books Gracián y la imaginación arquitectónica, Experiencia y representación en el Siglo de Oro, the anthology Barroco esencial, two surveys about Golden Age poetry, and has in press a critical edition of Lope de Vega’s play El poder vencido.

Professor Levine is a scholar, critic and translator of twentieth century Latin American literature, producing over 20 volumes of translations of some of the most challenging and original writing to come out of Latin America. For translation projects she has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts fellowship grants ,and a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Grant. Among her honors, she received the first PEN USA West Elinor D. Randall Prize for Literary Translation and the PEN American Center International Career Achievement award in Hispanic letters.  She was also awarded a Rockefeller individual scholar residency at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, as well as a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1997).

Some of Professor Levine’s recent translations are included in the definitive Non-Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges which received the National Book Circle Award for Criticism, and in 2000 she published her most ambitious project to-date, a 450 page literary biography of Manuel Puig.  Professor Levine has had full-time teaching positions at major research universities in the United States, and has lectured at many universities and institutions in the United States, Europe and Latin America.  Professor Levine’s other scholarly works include these books:  El espejo hablado (The Spoken Mirror),  Guia de Bioy Casares, The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction.

A special feature of her career as a scholar and translator of Latin American literature has been her work with and personal access to writers she has studied and translated, a unique context which led her to the genre of literary biography, in which she explores the connections between Puig's personality and creativity in the context of twentieth century Argentine history as well as Latin American literary history and politics, popular culture, gender studies and world cinema.
   

Professor Oliver specializes in Brazilian literature (Baroque and Colonial, 19th Century, Modernism, Contemporary), , Brazilian film, Brazilian music, Comparative literature, Portuguese literature (Early Modern, 19th and 20th centuries) History of ideas, History of art, Music, Philosophy, Literary criticism, theory and practice of translation, aiming at its proper contextualization within Brazilian culture, and its significance beyond its borders

A native of São Paulo, with close contacts with Brazilian cultural life, Professor Oliver received her Ph.D from the University of São Paulo (Music and Letters: Portuguese, English and French).  Her Post-doc studies were conducted at the  University of São Paulo and Yale University.  She has taught at the University of São Paulo and at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUC–São Paulo), and has held positions of Visiting researcher and lecturer at the University of Oxford, UK.

Her poetical works and articles have been published in various journals in the Americas and in Europe. Works include: Campo Ceifado Agora (Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras) (poems); Joyce e Rabelais:Três Leituras Menipéias (São Paulo: Ateliê Editorial); El Universo y O Sertão (Madrid: Ediciones del Orto), O Terceiro Livro dos Fatos e Ditos Heróicos do Bom Pantagruel by François Rabelais. (São Paulo: Ateliê Editorial) (Essays, Translation and Commentary).Translations into Portuguese include, among others: A Canção dos Loureiros by Édouard du Jardin (Rio de Janeiro: Globo); Aurélia, by Gérard de Nerval (São Paulo: Icone); poetry by T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Nerval, Baudelaire, Larkin. Translations into English include Carlos Drummond de Andrade, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Manuel Bandeira. Among the Brazilian authors, she has written about Machado de Assis – among which the award winning monography A Poesia de Machado no Século XXI: Revisita, Revisão (Brasília: Ministério das Relações Exteriores) – Raul Pompéia, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Clarice Lispector, Cecília Meireles, João Guimarães Rosa, and Lima Barreto.

Medieval Literature: Spanish, Portuguese,  Galician, Catalan; Comparative Literature: Arthurian romance; Catalan language and culture. Author of A Critical Bibliography of Hispanic Arthurian Material, I: Texts: The Prose Romance Cycles (London: Grant & Cutler, 1977); The Legendary History of Britain in Lope García de Salazar's Libro de las bienandanzas e fortunas (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979); editor with Frederick G. Williams of Studies on Jorge de Sena by His Colleagues and Friends (Santa Barbara: Jorge de Sena Center for Portuguese Studies, 1981); editor with E. Michael Gerli of Hispanic Medieval Studies in Honor of Samuel G. Armistead (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1992); compiler with Arthur L-F. Askins, Martha E. Schaffer, and Aida Fernanda Dias of BITAGAP (Bibliografia de Textos Antigos Galegos e Portugueses, part of CD-ROM PhiloBiblon: Electronic Bibliographies of Medieval Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish Texts, general editors Arthur L-F. Askins, Harvey L. Sharrer, and Charles B. Faulhaber (Berkeley: The Bancroft Library, 1999), with a version available on the Internet since 1997 with frequent up-dates (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/PhiloBiblon);  editor with Antonio Cortijo Ocaña and Giorgio Perissinotto of Estudios galegos medievais (Santa Barbara: Centro de Estudios Galegos, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, UCSB, 2001); co-author with Arthur L-F. Askins and Aida Fernanda Dias of Fragmentos de Textos Medievais Portugueses da Torre do Tombo (Lisboa: Instituto dos Arquivos Nacionais/Torre do Tombo, 2002); author of numerous essays on Arthurian, Tristan, Alexander, and sentimental romances, Galician-Portuguese poetry, pseudo-history and literatura de cordel. Recent graduate courses on Bibliography and Methods of Research, Textual Scholarship and Textual Criticism, Fernão Lopes and Medieval Portuguese Historiography.

Nineteenth and Twentieth century Spanish literature; Spanish and Latin American avant-garde, postmodernism, film and theater; literary and cultural criticism. Among his books are: La marcha al pueblo en las letras españolas 1917-1936 (1980); El cántico material y espiritual de César Vallejo (1981); Galdos, republicano y demócrata. Escritos políticos 1906-1913 (1982); Buñuel: Cine y literatura (1989); Benjamín Jarnés: Bio-grafía y metaficción (1989); Buñuel en México (1993); editor, La otra cara del 27: la novela social española 1923-1939 (Letras Peninsulares, Spring 1993); a critical edition of La regenta (Akal 1999); Antología de la poesía bohemia española, temas y figuras (Celeste 1999); numerous articles, chapters, and reviews on Spanish and Hispanic modern and contemporary literature, film, and sociocultural history. Los mundos de Buñuel (2000); a critical edition of Misericordia (Akal 2000); Editor of a monograph on Multilingual and Plurinational Spain (Letras Peninsulares, 2002).

Carlos H. Albarracín-Sarmiento , P.L., University of La Plata, Professor Emeritus
chalbarracin@spanport.ucsb.edu