Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies

We're delighted to present The Future of Hispanism, a two day conference organised by PhD students, Mazal Oaknin and Jessica Pujol. The conference will be held in the Department of Spanish & Latin American Studies, UCL on the 29th & 30th April, 2013.

Click here for the programme.

6.30-6.35 pm Welcome from Professor Stephen Hart of UCL and Graham Henderson from Poet in the City 

 The School of European Languages, Culture and Society has teamed up with the AHRC, Poet in the City, Europe House and Bloomsbury Hotel to provide an exciting programme of events in London starting in the spring and lasting until the autumn. Seven poets from Peru, Hungary, Holland, France, Germany, the Faroe Islands and Italy, will be coming to London to read their poetry, SELCS staff and RAs will be translating their poems into English, and the poetry along with the translations will be published in a special commemorative volume. The programme is as follows:

This project, organised by the School of European Languages, Culture and Society and funded as part of the "Intercultural Interaction" pathway of UCL's Grand Challenges, articulates the concept of "Gained in Translation" in a number of carefully-chosen events which celebrate poetry and the arts. Drawing inspiration from Robert Frost's famous dictum ("poetry is what gets lost in translation") we have teamed up with Poet in the City and with the Cervantes Institute to produce a three-part series on "Emotions in Translation" as well as two major events on "Gained in Translation" in which we focus on how poetry is translated into film (21 March 2013), and how ideas are translated across cultures (31 May 2013). We are pleased to announce that  Professor Terry Eagleton, widely regarded as the United Kingdom's most influential living literary critic, will give the keynote at the one-day colloquium on "Gained in Translation" on 31 May 2013.

On February 21, the Institute for the Study of the Americas, School of Advanced Study, University of London, will feature El ultimo verano de La Boyita [The Last Summer of la Boyita] (2000), a coming of age story directed by Julia Solomonoff and produced by Pedro Almodóvar. This will be the second of a series of groundbreaking Argentine productions that offer stimulating responses to issues of gender, race, inequality, politics, community, and the future. Dr Deborah Martin (Department of Spanish & Latin American Studies, UCL), will introduce the film.

The department of Spanish and Latin American Studies is delighted to announce one of our graduate students, Kathleen Sparks, has been awarded a grant under the Yale UCL Collaborative Student Exchange Programme to study at Yale University in the Autumn Term 2012.

Does Latin America Exist? Reflections on Continental Identity in Literature and Life in the Time of the Bicentenaries

Professor Benigno Trigo (Vanderbilt University)

WEDNESDAY, 6 JUNE @ 11AM

Dr Claire Lindsay has been awarded a Dorot Foundation Research Fellowship in Jewish Studies from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin for work on the Anita Brenner papers. This forms part of her ongoing 'Mapping Mexico' project, on illustrated travel magazines in Mexico, which has also been funded by the British Academy.

Science, Politics, Art: Re-visioning César Vallejo in the 21st Century

16-17 March 2012

December 1st 2011

We are pleased to announce that BA MILARS student, Roberta Radu has had another prize-winning article published in the Guardian. You can read Roberta's article, 'The Power of Saving' here.

Dept of Spanish & Latin American Studies, UCL receive LUKAS award nomination

Latinolife, the UK's leading Hispanic arts, culture and listings magazine have just launched LUKAS (Latin-UK) Awards 2011, which recognise the contribution of the Latin American, Spanish and Portuguese communities to UK society.

The Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies, UCL has been nominated for the Educational Institute of the Year Award! The awards are decided by popular vote, and the educational institute with the most votes wins.

Please vote here

We are pleased to announce that final year BA MILARS student, Roberta Radu has been shortlisted for The Guardian International Development Journalism Competition 2011. You can read Roberta's article 'Romania's Child Brides'  here.

Inaugural Lecture

A Liberal Life: Biopolitical Retrojections in Antonio Alcalá-Galiano’s Recuerdos de un anciano

Maria del Pilar Blanco, and her co-author, Esther Pereen, have been awarded the Ray and Pat Browne Award for the Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture in 2010 for their book Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture.

Early Colonial History Symposium

Wednesday, 20th April 2011

Foster Court, Room 101.

This August, the BFI is exploring the recent renaissance of filmmaking across South America. The re-emergence of national cinemas has coincided with a tide of genuine political democracy that has swept the continent. Highlights of the season include Bolivia, an early example of New Argentine Cinema, which deals with the country’s uneasy relationship with its South American immigrants and City of God, a sprawling, engrossing account of the rise of drug gangs in Rio. For more information visit: www.bfi.org.uk/go/uclsouthamerican

We are pleased to announce that under the Block Grant Partnership, we are able to offer one doctoral studentship to commence in September 2010. The studentship will enable a successful postgraduate applicant to undertake and complete a doctoral degree (PhD) in our department. Full and partial awards are available through this scheme. A full award covers fees and an annual, tax free stipend of £13,290 (2009/10 rates). A partial award covers fees only. The Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at UCL has academic staff whose expertise covers a wide range of subjects in areas including: Spanish cinema, Latin American cinema, nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture of Spain and Latin America, the culture and history of early modern Spain and Latin America, Latino and hemispheric American studies.

UCL Spanish and Latin American Studies department presents EL MÉTODO GRONHÖLM

in Spanish, based on the play by Jordi Galcerán adapted by Mateo Gil & Marcelo Piñeyro

4th and 5th February 2010, 7:30 p.m. at the Bloomsbury Theatre
(15 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0AH)

A biting satire of faceless and dehumanising multinational corporations, the Gronhölm method pushes seven applicants at an interview to ignore ethical boundaries and see how far they are willing to compromise their moral values in order to get the job. One of them is a company mole, while two of their number know each other from before. Are they willing to manipulate their past romantic entanglement in order to secure the post in the mysterious corporation or will love triumph over greed? A modern day parable for our times, this play has become ever more relevant in the light of the global paroxysm of the credit and banking crises.

FMI 2009 (10-13 November)

Launched in UCL in 2006 the Festival of the Moving Image (FMI) offers a space for the fusion of film theory and film-making in contemporary Britain. Held each year in November the FMI showcases documentaries made at the International Film and TV School in Cuba during the summer, offers roundtable discussions on what’s going on in contemporary film, and Q&A sessions with the cream of today’s international film directors. The theme of FMI 2009 is Shattered Space and the Legacy of the Revolution. The festival kicks off with a session dedicated to Memories of Underdevelopment and a Q&A with the scriptwriter, Edmundo Desnoes, Felicia Hirsch (who played Hanna in the film) and Mirtha Ibarra (who played Nancy in Strawberry and Chocolate). Day 2 features the documentaries made at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Television, Cuba, in the Summer of 2009, and day 3 features a star appearance by Alfonso Cuaron, the celebrated director of Y tu mama tambien. For more information on the programme, click here.

Claire Lindsay, Contemporary Travel Writing of Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2010).

28 June - 23 July 2010

The Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at University College London, in association with the Escuela International de Cine y Television in Cuba and Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada, is pleased to offer an intensive, hands-on Documentary Summer School in Cuba next summer, running from Monday 28 June until Friday 23 July 2010. The workshop will be held at the world-famous Escuela Internacional de Cine y Television which is situated just 30 miles outside Havana in San Antonio de los Baños. Founded in 1986 by Gabriel García Marquez, the International Film and Television School -- known as a 'Vatican for Film-Makers' -- is now directed by Tanya Valette, one of the first generation of graduates from the school in 1990. Tanya Valette is from the Dominican Republic and has extensive international filmmaking experience.

The course will be taught by one of the School's regular professors, Enrique Colina, who has been making innovative documentaries and films for over twenty years, gaining many international awards for his work. He is also well known in Cuba as the host of an enormously popular TV show about cinema of the 1970s and 1980s called "24 x Segundo" (24 Times a Second). His most recent film, Entre ciclones (Between Cyclones, 2003), was shown to great acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival. Professor Stephen Hart of the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at UCL, is the co-ordinator of the course and he will be travelling with the group from London to the Film School. 

This intensive course has been specially devised in order to inspire participants to make their own documentary within the four-week period. In the mornings students watch, analyse and discuss a selection of canonic documentaries, in order better to comprehend the the genre and mechanics of the documentary form. The afternoons, and weekends, are spent filming. In the first two weeks students will create five, individual 1-2 minute exercises, 'Self-portait', 'The protagonist', 'Conflict Within the Frame', 'Mood of a Place' and 'Stages of a Process'. For weeks 3 and 4, students team up in groups of four or five in order to devise, create, script, film, and edit their own 8-10 minute documentary. Filming takes place in Havana, and each group is provided with a producer, a cameraman, a sound technician and an editor, as well as transport to and from Havana. Editing takes place in one of the EICTV's fully-equipped editing suites, with AVID or Final Cut. Enrique Colina (EICTV), Stephen Hart (UCL) and Alex Anderson (Ryerson University) work with the teams as the documentary is taking shape. The documentaries are screened at the EICTV on the last Friday of the course and subsequently in November 2010 at the Bloomsbury Theatre in UCL.

The Summer School is open to students from the UK, continental Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand who are currently studying for, or have graduated from, a degree in film studies, media studies, Hispanic/Latin American studies or other relevant areas. You do not need practical experience in filmmaking to take this course. You do not need to speak Spanish as translation is available.