Summer Academic Grant Awarded to Professors Borowitz, Fernandez-Mallat, Francomano, Gentic, and LaRubia-Prado

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The Department of Spanish and Portuguese is excited to announce that Professors Molly Borowitz, Victor Fernandez-Mallat, Emily Francomano, Tania Gentic, and Francisco LaRubia-Prado were awarded Summer Academic Grants for 2020. The Summer Academic Grant Program provides support for two consecutive months of work on a research or creative arts project. Please join us in extending our congratulations!

Molly Borowitz works on spiritual and political subjecthood in early modern Spain and Spanish America and the relationship between 16th- and 17th-century literature and 20th- and 21st-century critical theory. Her interests include subject formation in the Baroque and colonial contexts, discursive representations of affective, mystical, and other forms of interior experience; aesthetic and cultural reflections of early capitalism, and the emergence of the modern State. She has published recently on rhetorical strategies in the writing of St. Teresa of Ávila. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2019. At Georgetown, she teaches classes on early modern literature and culture.

Professor Fernández-Mallat works on understanding the social and linguistics factors that affect language variation, and the various ways in which speakers use this variation to project their identities in interaction. His current research explores variation in forms of address (FOAs), particularly variation that occurs in Chilean Spanish and in dialectal contact situations in the U.S. In his research, he examines the social meaning granted to different FOAs and the role of identity projection and context in the variation of said forms. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Montreal in 2014. At Georgetown, he teaches courses on Spanish Sociolinguistics.

Professor Francomano’s research revolves around three interrelated key subjects in medieval and Early Modern cultural production: translation, book history, and gender studies. She is particularly interested in how certain narratives, particularly those about gender identities, are told and re-told in many different literary and material forms, from medieval manuscripts and illuminations to film and digital remediations. Her work on translation history and theory runs parallel to her practice as a translator. Francomano’s research has been supported by the grants from the NEH, the ACLS, and a Fulbright Fellowship. 

Tania Gentic is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and a core faculty member of the Comparative Literature Program. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and regularly teaches undergraduate courses on 19th-21st century Peninsular and Latin American literature, culture, and film. She also teaches comparative literature classes and graduate courses on critical theory, transatlantic literature and thought, and sound studies. She has published multiple articles and several books, including The Everyday Atlantic: Time, Knowledge, and Subjectivity in the Twentieth-Century Iberian and Latin American Newspaper Chronicle (SUNY 2013); Technology, Literature, and Digital Culture in Latin America: Mediatized Sensibilities in a Globalized Era (Routledge 2016), co-edited with Matthew Bush; and Imperialism and the Wider Atlantic: Essays on the Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics of Transatlantic Cultures (Palgrave MacMillan 2017), co-edited with Francisco LaRubia-Prado. Her current book project is on the culture and politics of sound in Barcelona.

Francisco LaRubia-Prado (PhD Cornell University) is a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He has also taught at Princeton University and at John Hopkins University. He has published and edited books on Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, the Enlightenment, the Romantic period, Miguel de Cervantes, and intellectual history. His most recent books are in the fields of transatlantic studies (The Wider Atlantic. Co-edited with Tania Gentic, 2017) and animal studies and comparative literature (The Horse in Literature and Film, 2017). He has published many essays on literary and cultural issues ranging from the Middle Ages to today. His current project is a book on the cultural impact of spectacles, from reality shows to carnivals.