International Hispanic Studies Conference to Honor Two UB Faculty Members

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Rosario Ferré, Puerto Rico's most celebrated and popular author, will join eminent critic and editor Diana de Armas Wilson as a featured speaker at "Convergencias Hispánicas," an international Hispanic studies conference to be held April 9-11 at the University at Buffalo.

Ferré and de Armas Wilson are two of the most distinguished scholars and writers in the field of Hispanic studies. Although there is a registration fee for those participating in the conference, their lectures will be free and open to the public.

The event is sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences and its Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. It will honor the life work of two of UB's most highly regarded Hispanists, Edward Dudley and Mireya Camurati, who will retire this year.

Both Dudley and Camurati have authored and edited several books. Dudley's most recent is "Endless Text: Don Quixote and The Hermeneutics of Romance," which was selected as an outstanding academic book in English of 1998 by Choice, the magazine of the American Library Association. Camurati specializes in the work of Jorge Luis Borges and in Latin American avant garde literature from the early to mid-20th century.

Conference convenor Elizabeth Scarlett, assistant professor of Spanish, said the purpose of the conference is to further Hispanism, the study of Hispanic cultures, including those of Spain and Latin American, and of Latino cultures in the U.S. The conference will feature sections on culture studies and literature, film and linguistics, and has attracted presenters from Spain, Portugal, Canada, California, Texas and Utah.

Ferré is a very popular and prize-winning novelist, poet and short fiction writer whose work is beautifully crafted and considered very accessible to readers. It can be found in virtually every library in the United States.

Ferré's latest book is "Eccentric Neighborhood," but her best-known novel is "The House on the Lagoon," a 1995 nominee for the National Book Award. It won the Critics Choice Award and was a Book of the Month selection that year as well. Both novels explore the constant historical struggle between Puerto Rico's competing races, languages, religions and classes through sensuous tales of upper-class island families.

Ferré has spoken at innumerable conferences in the United States and her work has appeared in many literary publications in the U.S., Latin America and Puerto Rico, where she is an associate professor of comparative literatures at the University of Puerto Rico.

Critic Mark Childress, writing in the New York Times Book Review, noted that her books are not replete with the kind of magic realism that has lovers bursting into flames. Instead, he writes, "the magic in Ferré's fiction arises from the intertwined experiences of human beings, carrying the story of 20th-century Puerto Rico in the arc of their lives." Her books have been translated into German, Dutch, French, Greek and English.

Ferré will present a talk in Spanish, "Mi Casa es Todas Las Casas" ("My House is Everyone's House") at 5 p.m. Saturday April 10 in the Center for Tomorrow on the UB North (Amherst) Campus.

Diana de Armas Wilson is an eminent Hispanist Renaissance scholar whose work, which combines psychoanalysis and feminism, is widely anthologized. She has written three books and served as sole editor of the 1998 Norton edition of Cervantes' "Don Quixote."

A professor of English at the University of Denver, she has lectured and presented invited papers at conferences all over the United States. The author is widely published in eminent journals and has received many professional honors.

She will lecture in English on "Caribbean Convergences: Cervantes, Defoe and Cannibalism" at 4:30 p.m. Friday April 9 in the Center for Tomorrow.

All other conference sessions will be closed to all but conference registrants. The registration fee will be $80 at the door of the Center for Tomorrow. For further information on programming and registration, contact Scarlett at 645-2191, ext. 1197, or log onto the conference Web site at wings.buffalo.edu/academic/department/AandL/mll .