Dr. Lígia Bezerra talk on "Working Class Consumption in Contemporary Brazilian Literature"

Lígia Bezerra is an Assistant Professor at Spelman College, where she is the director of the Portuguese program. She has a PhD in Portuguese with a minor in Culture Studies from Indiana University, an MA in Portuguese from the University of New Mexico, an MA in Linguistics from the Federal University of Ceará, and a BA in Letras with a double major in Portuguese and English from the Federal University of Ceará as well. Her research focuses on contemporary Latin American literature and culture, consumer culture, and everyday life.

Special Guest Colloquium: Dr. Sally Magnan, “College Student Goals and the National Standards”

A specialist in Second-Language Acquisition, Dr. Magnan served as the Director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Language Institute and was Editor of the Modern Language Journal for fourteen years.  She has taught courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels in college teaching methods, second language studies, French language, and topics in French immigration.  She has also received the honor of Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

Talk by Noël Valis on "Celebrity, Sex, and Mass Readership: The Case of Álvaro Rentana."

This talk draws new attention to Álvaro Retana, an immensely popular figure in Spain’s pre-Civil War period, who wrote racy, erotic novels. A reappraisal of his literary career illuminates the broader cultural context of Spanish society of the early twentieth century. Professor Valis is the author of The Culture of Cursilería: Bad Taste, Kitsch and Class in Modern Spain (Duke University Press), which won the Modern Language Association’s 2003 Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, the highest award for a book in the foreign languages.

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