The Centre for Canadian Studies at ULL

In 1992 a group of specialists in Canadian Studies working at our university under the direction of Prof. Dr. Bernd Dietz Guerrero found the Centre for Canadian Studies at the University of La Laguna (CEC), thus creating a space for the research and study of very diverse areas of Canadian culture in the fields of Arts and Social Sciences. Starting with a library of more than 1000 titles donated by the Embassy of Canada in Spain, the CEC, under the direction of Dr. Juan Ignacio Oliva Cruz since 1997, has become a reference point for both Spanish and foreign scholars. You can learn more about our Centre and the previous editions of our Course at our webpage here.

This year's speakers

Here you can find an overview of the artists and specialists taking part in this year's edition of our Course. This section is still in progress:

Canadian speakers

Neil Bissoondath

Bissoondath was born in Trinidad and Tobago, a relative of Nobel Prize V.S. Naipaul and Shiva Naipaul. He has dealt, so much in his novels and short stories as in his critical pieces, with the concepts of alienation and exile which surround the immigrant experience. With short story collections like Digging Up the Mountains (1985) and novels like A Casual Brutality (1988), Bissoondath has become one of the most relevant voices of today's literary scene, as his nomination for the Governor General's Award in 1998 shows. However, his best-selling book to date is his critique of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1971, under the title Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (1994) a controversial questioning of the real consequences of the Canadian system of cultural integration. You can learn more about Bissoondath at the Quill and Quire website and at The New Internationalist.

Shyam Selvadurai

Canadian novelist of Sri Lankan origin (1965-). One of the most celebrated writers of Canada's newest literary panorama, Selvadurai tackles the questions of race, social conflict and sexual development in his work. His first novel, Funny Boy (1994), received the Lambda Literary Award and the Books in Canada First Novel Award. With his second novel, Cinnamon Gardens (1998), his talent for the depiction of generational and gender conflict was even more widely recognized. His latest novel, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea (2005), is the first he writes for a younger audience, and has been awarded the Lambda Award in that category. If you want to learn more about Selvadurai, you can check more info about Funny Boy here, Selvadurai's thoughts about writing his second novel here, and his own account of living in Sri Lanka and Canada at The Times website.

Pierre Szalowski

Szalowski's versatile career speaks by itself: from graphic designer to vice-president of Ubisoft; from photographer for the press to literary author, Szalowski has tackled almost any field of creative production. His first novel Le froid modifie la trajectoire des poissons (2007) has been praised as a groundbreaking work in which Szalowski manages to master the art of voicing the different characters. In his blog, Szalowski asserts his wish to make his life "a permanent adventure," one which has taken him as far as to the world of screen writing. If you want to learn more about him, you can get to his blog from here.

National researchers

Dr. Carmen Flys Junquera

Carmen Flys Junquera is Associate Professor at the University of Alcalá de Henares. She holds a Ph. D from that same university since 1999. Her teaching experience has been focused on academic writing and North-American literature. Her main fields of research are contemporary ethnic literature from the United States, particularly of Latin and Afro-American peoples, mixed races, eco-criticism and ethnic detective literature. Among her main publications are Learning to Write: Error Analysis Applied (Garcés, Mancho, Flys and Cerdá, 2003), “Nature’s Voice: Ecological Consciousness in Rudolfo Anaya’s Alburquerque Quartet” (Aztlán 2002), “Shifting Borders and Intersecting Territories: Rudolfo Anaya” (Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands 2002), “Misrepresenting the Hard-Boiled Tradition: Community vs. Individualism in Contemporary Ethnic Detectives”((Mis) Representations. Intersections of Culture and Power, 2003).

Dr. Marta González Acosta

Marta González Acosta received her PhD in 2008 with a dissertation on the trace of romanticism in the work of Shyam Selvadurai, Paul Golding, Jamie O’Neill and Mark Behr. Her research interests lie in the field of romantic theory and philosophy, and specially, in the way in which romanticism has survived as a movement and as a defining factor in the moulding of the Western conception of the world. She has analysed the work of Shyam Selvadurai extensively, and has carried out research on the German roots and English assimilation of the Bildungsroman technique. She is currently carrying out research on Lord Byron. She has been a full time teacher of English at the Official School of Languages in La Laguna since 2004.

Dr. Luz González Rodríguez

Luz González Rodríguez is an Assistant Professor at the University of La Laguna. Her research interests lie in the area of Anglo-Canadian literature (especially from a psychoanalytic and symbolic perspective), Women Studies, Cultural Studies, South Asian Canadian Literature, Class/Gender/Race Studies, Contemporary English Literature (especially poetry) and painting (Group of Seven, Emily Carr, Frida Kahlo, Magic Realism, etc.). She has carried out research on Anglo-Indian writers, such as Salman Rushdie, Kamala Das, Uma Parameswaran, Sherazad Jamal and Meena Alexander; on British authors like Peter Ackroyd, Carol Anne Duffy and Helen Dunmore; on Canadian authors like Gwendolyn MacEwen, Margaret Atwood, P.K. Page, Alice Munro and Emily Carr, and has attended and participated in numerous conferences in Spain, Brussels, Sweden. Her PhD was focused on the poetic work of the Canadian writer Gwendolyn MacEwen. She has been actively involved in the academic activities of the Center for Canadian Studies at the University of La Laguna since 1992.

Dr. Carmen Mata Barreiro

Carmen Mata Barreiro, titulaire d’un doctorat en Philologie Française de l’Université Complutense de Madrid, est Professeure Titulaire à l’Universidad Autónoma de Madrid et a été Professeure invitée à l’Université de Montréal dans les années académiques 1999-2000, 2000-2001 et 2001-2002. Ses recherches portent sur la littérature et la civilisation françaises et francophones et sur la civilisation espagnole : identité et altérité dans le récit de voyage et la littérature migrante, ville et immigration, le travail de mémoire chez les écrivains francophones et l’écriture au féminin (cf. Nicole Brossard, écrivaines migrantes en France, Belgique et au Québec), littérature de l’exil et littérature migrante en Espagne. Elle a publié des livres en Belgique et en France, et est auteure de nombreux articles, parus au Canada, Espagne, France, Liban, Grèce, Irlande, Italie, Suède et Portugal. Elle a participé, au Québec, aux ouvrages collectifs Ville imaginaire/Ville identitaire : Échos de Québec (1999), Les identités urbaines : Échos de Montréal (2003), Le français, langue de la diversité québécoise. Une réflexion pluridisciplinaire (2006), Du tricoté serré au métissé serré ? La culture publique commune au Québec en débats (2008) ainsi qu’au volume 7 du Dictionnaire des Œuvres Littéraires du Québec (1981-1985) (2003). Elle prépare un livre sur les Espagnes imaginaires du Québec et a coordonné un numéro de Globe. Revue internationale d’études québécoises sur « Étranger et territorialité » (vol. 10, 1, 2007). Elle est membre du Comité scientifique international de la revue Recherches Sociographiques (Québec), membre du comité scientifique de GLOBE, Revue internationale d’études québécoises (Québec), membre du Comité scientifique international de la Revue des Lettres et de Traduction (Liban) et membre du Conseil d’administration de l’Association Internationale des Études québécoises –AIEQ-. Elle est aussi membre de l’IUEM (Institut universitaire d’études sur la femme) de l’Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

Isaías Naranjo Acosta

Isaías Naranjo Acosta (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1968) completed his Degree in English and German Philology at the University of Barcelona in 1991 and began studying CanLit tutored by Prof. Bernd Dietz at the University of La Laguna by the end of this same year. His research work has turned around the work of Canadian fiction writer, poet, and critic Robert Kroetsch, on which he presented his Ma Thesis in 1998. Nevertheless, he has also paid attention to other Canadian authors, such as Michael Ondaatje, Robert Bringhurst, or Dennis Lee. At present, he teaches English language for Business and Tourism studies at ULL, which has not prevented him from continuing with his research on CanLit.

Dr. Juan Ignacio Oliva Cruz

Dr Juan Ignacio Oliva is Full Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Philology at the Universidad de La Laguna (Tenerife, Canary Islands), where he currently teaches Postcolonial Anglophone Literatures (with an interest in Canadian, Indo-English, Irish and Chicano/a cultures) at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He has published extensively on contemporary authors, such as John Fowles, D.M. Thomas, Salman Rushdie, Shyam Selvadurai, Sunetra Gupta, Jamie O’Neill, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Abelardo Delgado, Ricardo Sánchez, and others. He is also presently the Head of the La Laguna Center for Canadian Studies, the current editor of Canadaria (Revista Canaria de Estudios Canadienses) and the current secretary of RCEI (Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses). Recently, he has been elected Member of the Advisory Board of EASLCE (the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment) and committeeperson of AEEII (Spanish Association of Interdisciplinary Studies about India).

Dr. Patricia Pareja Ríos

Dr. Patricia Pareja Ríos, professor of French philology at ULL, finished her studies through a double degree program in Montpellier and Barcelona. She received her PhD at ULL with a dissertation on surrealism in Paris and in the Canary Islands. She has published numerous articles in Spanish and international journals and is a member of the Scientific Committee of Hermeneus (the journal of translation and interpretation of the University of Valladolid). Her main research interest at the moment is the relationship between Francophonie and identity: she is the co-organizer of the first conference on Francophonie at ULL, which centres on the figure of L.S. Senghor, about whom she will soon publish a chapter in a specialised book from the publishing company Idea. She is also analysing the work of women writers in the French-speaking world.

Leonor Ruiz-Ayúcar Bello

Leonor Ruiz-Ayúcar Bello is a Ph.D. student from the Universidad de La Laguna. She is researching for her Ph.D. dissertation based on American neo-gothic literature, focusing mainly in Anne Rice’s work. Her interests involve American literature and culture, Canadian literature and other postcolonial literatures as well as gender and queer. She has published articles involving gothic culture and literature in Canada. Recently she has been invited to speak about the doppelgänger in Poe’s fiction in Madrid. She is currently writing about Edgar Allan Poe and his influence in Spanish music.

Important

Due to changes in the schedule, the lectures by novelist Neil Bissoondath and Prof. Carmen Mata, originally planned for the afternoon session of Quebec Day on November the 5th, have been postponed to a single morning session of the Course which will take place on November the 18th, from 10.00 to 14.00.

Welcome to the XIX Superior Course of Canadian Studies Blog

This is your source of information for the XIX Curso Superior de Estudios Canadienses (XIX Higher Course of Canadian Studies), which will take place at the Faculty of Philology, University of La Laguna, Spain, from November 3 to November 5, 2009. Soon you will find here our programme.

This year's edition we are honoured to bring to our audience three great Canadian artists from very different backgrounds: novelists Shyam Selvadurai and Neil Bissoondath and photographer/writer Pierre Szalowski. Our Course will open on November 3 with a series of lectures comprising very different fields of Canadian culture, from painting to literature. The two following days will centre on the cultural expressions of two of the Canadian provinces: Ontario (Wednesday 4) and Quebec (Thursday 5). Our main interest will be, as every year, to open up a space for debate and reflection on Canadian culture and to give anyone interested the chance to interact with some of the most remarkable artists and specialists of our day.

Over the next few days we will update this blog with more information about all our speakers, news about the conference and information about how to register. You are welcome to send any questions or doubts to our email address xixcurso@gmail.com.

Thanks for visiting!