Professor Adriana Méndez Rodenas of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese will deliver the keynote lecture at the Women Travelers in Latin America Symposium, to be presented by the Americas Society in New York City May 16-18.
Méndez Rodenas will deliver her keynote lecture, titled “Women Travelers in Latin America: The Transatlantic Imagination,” on Thursday, May 17, at 7:00 p.m. (6:00 p.m. Iowa time). The lecture will be streamed live on the Internet. For more information about the event and the live video stream, visit http://www.as-coa.org/watchlisten/video-women-travelers-symposium-launch-review-84.
In her address, Méndez Rodenas will present a panorama of literary and artistic production by women travelers in Latin America, principally in the nineteenth century. As historical witnesses, these women have impacted our understanding of Latin America and the Caribbean. Swedish novelist and early feminist Fredrika Bremer (1801-1865) drew a portrait of slave society in Cuba, while other travelers shed light on post-independence societies, particularly Parisian social activist and early feminist Flora Tristan (1803 –1844) in Peru, Madame Calderón de la Barca (1804-1882) in Mexico, and Maria Graham (1785-1842) in Chile. The lecture will conclude by highlighting the broader context and relevance of the travelers today as reflected in contemporary fiction.
Méndez Rodenas is also the guest editor of Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, no. 84 (Women Travelers in Latin America, May 2012), published by the Americas Society.
Méndez Rodenas teaches Latin American literature in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, which is part of the Division of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures in the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. She is currently a Fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. She has published amply in the field of travel writing, including Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba—The Travels of Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Condesa de Merlin (1998), and a critical edition of Mercedes Merlin’s Viaje a la Habana (2009). Her book Transatlantic Pilgrims: Women Travelers to Nineteenth-Century Latin America is forthcoming from Bucknell University Press.
The Americas Society, founded in 1965 by David Rockefeller, is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to promote greater awareness about the societies and cultures of the Western Hemisphere. Its Department of Literature has presented far-reaching public programs—bilingual readings, lectures, book presentations and conferences—featuring prominent and lesser-known Latin American, Caribbean and Canadian writers and scholars. These have included Jorge Luis Borges; Nobel Prize winners such as Octavio Paz, Derek Walcott and Mario Vargas Llosa; and contemporary voices in the region. The organization’s other activities have included a subvention program for the translation of more than 80 works of Latin American literature, including Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. In addition, its magazine, Review, founded in 1968, has been a premier forum for writing from throughout the Americas in English and English translation, and for coverage on the Latin American and Caribbean arts. Review first brought the work of Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Alejo Carpentier, Severo Sarduy and Mario Vargas Llosa to critical attention in the United States.