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I joined the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at BYU after receiving my PhD in Romance Studies from Cornell University in 1998, specializing in Hispanic literature. I regularly teach courses including Latin American Culture, Introduction to Hispanic Literature, and Survey of Spanish American Literature, as well as specialized courses and graduate seminars on various topics in Latin American poetry, Borges, and philosophical issues in literature. In addition to Árbol de imágenes: historia de la poesía latinoamericana, (University of Mississippi Press, forthcoming) and a handful of articles on poetry, I have published a number of articles on Borges and other writers who have shown up on my radar screen for one reason or another, from the well known (Mariano Azuela, Martín Luis Guzmán, Benito Pérez Galdós, José Asunción Silva) to the more obscure (contemporary Mexican writer Luis Arturo Ramos, Chilean writer Jaime Collyer, and Costa Rican poet Eunice Odio). In early 2006 I expect to submit for publication a manuscript entitled Embodying Skepticism: Cervantes, Borges, Amenábar which explores the philosophical tradition of radical skepticism as it is envisioned (and transformed) in Hispanic literature and film. I take an active interest in philosophy in general and have been an occasional part-time PhD student in philosophy at the University of Utah, taking doctoral seminars when circumstances permit.
I should finally mention the personal, and increasingly professional, interest that I take in Basque and Basque-American literature and culture. My own family history is connected to the wave of immigration from the Gernika region of Euskal Herria to the Boise area at the turn of the last century and I have recently begun to lay the groundwork for future teaching and research along these lines. I am currently preparing to teach a summer term course in 2008 on Basque and Basque-American literature with support from BYU’s Center for the Study of Europe. I am also beginning to work on a book project tentatively entitled Borges among the Basques: Transnationalities and the Project of Basque Identity. I expect to write the first chapter, on the shadow of Borges in Ramon Saizarbitoria’s Ehun metro, in early 2006. |