Jo Labanyi to launch Center for the Humanities Faculty Fellows’ Series Feb. 27-28

Jo Labanyi, professor of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, will speak on “Facts and Fictions: Knowledge, Delinquency and Madness in Late 19-Century Spain” at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 27, in Umrath Lounge.

Labanyi is the first of six speakers appearing this spring as part of the Center for the Humanities’ 2007 Faculty Fellows’ Lecture and Workshop Series. Her talk, drawing on Mary Poovey’s A History of the Modern Fact, will investigate the construction of deviance in 19th-century Spanish fiction. In particular, Labanyi will explore how such texts both create and transmit knowledge about delinquency and madness and how they inform contemporary understanding of Spanish literary history.

In addition, Labanyi will lead a workshop at 1 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 28, in the McMillan Café. The workshop will focus on the rigid ordering of gender in 19th-century Spain and how such ordering reflected a cultural obsession with the documentation of all forms of national life. Discussions will investigate the ways in which the marginalized, who did not fulfill the standard requirements of membership in civil society, were known both by others and to themselves.

Labanyi was invited to campus by 2007 Faculty Fellow Akiko Tsuchiya, associate professor of Romance Languages & Literatures in Arts & Sciences. “She has done groundbreaking work on Spanish literature, cultural history, film and gender studies,” Tsuchiya explains. “The sheer interdisciplinary breadth of her work—from 19th-century narrative to 20th-century cinema—makes her an ideal visitor for the Center for the Humanities.”

Labanyi is founding editor of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies and general editor of the ‘Remapping Cultural History’ series for Berghahn Books. Her books include Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel (1989) co-edited with Helen Graham; Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction (1995), co-edited with Lou Charnon-Deutsch; Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel (2000); and Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain: Theoretical Debates and Cultural Practice (2002). In 2005 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

The Faculty Fellows’ Series will continue March 6 with a presentation by Tsuchiya. Subsequent speakers will include:

March 20: Guthrie P Ramsey, Jr., associate professor in the Music Department, University of Pennsylvania.

March 23: Gerald Izenberg, professor of History in Arts & Sciences.

April 10: Patrick Burke, assistant professor of Music in Arts & Sciences.

April 24: Carol Greenhouse, professor in the Department of Anthropology, Princeton University.

All events are free and open to the public and are sponsored by the Center for the Humanities’ in Arts & Sciences. Umrath Lounge is located in Karl Umrath Hall, located immediately north of the Mallinckrodt Student Center, 6445 Forsyth Blvd. McMillan Cafe is located in McMillan Hall, on Throop Drive near the intersection with Forest Park Parkway. Parking is available nearby in the lower level of the Throop Garage. For more information (or a free parking sticker) please contact (314) 935-5576.