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In this seminar the speaker shares her current writing project which will take the form of a non-fiction narrative essay that will be published in 2025. In her book Cristina intend to reconstruct the history of two fundamental institutions for female education in Spain: The International Institute for Girls in Spain, founded in 1892 by New England missionary Alice Gordon Gulick (1847-1903), and the Residencia de Señoritas, directed in Madrid by María de Maeztu between 1915 and 1936; also she studies and recreates the bonds of friendship and the transatlantic cultural exchanges that were woven over decades between the teachers and students of these educational centers of both countries, such as those between the American educators Susan Huntington Vernon, Caroline Bourland or Katherine Whitmore, and the Spanish Josefina Carabias, Zenobia Camprubí or Victoria Kent, in addition to Gulick and Maeztu. Moreover, the book unearths the memory of the first exchanges between women from Spanish and American universities during the 1910s and 1920s (Smith College, Middlebury College).
During the seminar, we will have the opportunity to know about the documents of Gulick and Whitmore that are held in Harvard Libraries.
The seminar recreates a historical period marked by the debates on suffrage and women’s education, as well as by the Spanish-American War, World War I, the Avant-Garde, and the political conflicts that emerge in Europe in the 1930s. In addition, Señoritas also aims to offer a reflection on biographical writing and the politics/poetics of memory today.
Finally, Cristina will show an overview of the recent scholarship on the women of the Generation of ‘27, as well as the numerous exhibition catalogs, audiovisual projects, collections of letters, and diaries that have been published in recent years. Among them, the speaker will refer to current writers who have been inspired by the women of the Generation of ‘27 in creating their literary works to highlight the intergenerational dialog within the Spanish literary canon.
Picture: © Instituto Internacional
You can follow this seminar here
Speaker: Cristina Oñoro Otero, (Associate Professor, Department of Spanish Language and Literary Theory, Universidad Complutense de Madrid; author of Las que faltaban. Una historia del mundo diferente (Taurus, 2022); BBVA Foundation Grant Holder 2022 (Creative Writing and Performing Arts)
Sponsors: RCCHU; Complutense Univesity; BBVA Foundation