Spain and the Atlantic Coast of The United States by Carmen Benito-Vessels

The Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress hosts the talk “Spain and the Atlantic Coast of The United States: Four Characters from the 16th Century in Search of an Author” by Carmen Benito-Vessels.

Carmen Benito-Vessels, Professor at University of Maryland’s School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, explores historical narratives of Early Modern Times on the East Coast of the United States through 16th Century Spanish texts, focusing on the voyages, settlements, and exploration of the East Coast between 1521 and 1572, underscoring the Spanish legacy in the U.S. The discussion will be moderated by Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, from the City College-CUNY, and Allison Bigelow, from University of Virginia.

Carmen Benito-Vessels

A graduate of the Universities of Salamanca (1977), and California-Santa Barbara (1988), Dr. Benito-Vessels is the author of four books: Juan Manuel: Escritura y recreación de la historia (University of Wisconsin, Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1994); La palabra en el tiempo de las letras. Una historia heterodoxa (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007); Lenguaje y valor en la literatura medieval española (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 2013) and España y la costa atlántica de los EEUU. Cuatro personajes del siglo XVI en busca de autor (2017).

She is one of the editors of two volumes: The Picaresque. A Symposium on the Rogue’s Tale (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994) and Women at Work in Spain from The Middle Ages to Early Modern Times (New York: Peter Lang 1998). Benito-Vessels is also the co-author of Horizontes: Cultura y Literatura (Boston: Heinle and Heinle, 3rd edition 1997, and 4TH edition 2000). She has published articles and conducts research on the fields of medieval historiography and poetry, the interaction of medieval literary genres and on Hispanic philology. Her courses and seminars focus on medieval Spanish literature, history of the Spanish language.

Raquel Chang-Rodríguez

Chang-Rodríguez (Ph.D., New York University) is Distinguished Professor of Hispanic literature and culture at the Graduate Center and The City College (CCNY) of the City University of New York (CUNY), where she served as Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures (1995-2000). She has held visiting posts at Colgate University as Colgate Professor of the Humanities and at Columbia University, and has taught in seminars in Spain at the Universidad de la Laguna (Santa Cruz de Tenerife), the Universidad Complutense, summer session at El Escorial, and the Universidad de Málaga, and in Germany at Philipps Universität Margburg.

Allison Bigelow

Bigelow is Assistant Professor of Spanish of the University of Virginia’s Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Her studies focus on the history of colonial science and technology, especially vernacular sciences like agriculture and mining, applying literary methods to texts that fall between the “gap” of history and literature –technical treatises, memoriales de arbitristas, legal papers– to unearth the rich literacies and intellectual agencies of understudied groups, like women, indigenous, and Afro-Latin artisans.