Our Distinguished Faculty

The faculty of the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature are dedicated mentors and teachers. They also are fine scholars and researchers, recognized for their scholarship and research by learning institutions around the world. Faculty interests cover all aspects of the Hispanic culture from literature and linguistics to visual culture and film. Major methodological approaches to cultural analysis are fully represented within the department. They include: philology, poetics, cultural studies, Marxism, feminism, colonialism, and postmodernism. The department co-sponsors the publication of La Perinola: Revista de Investigación Quevediana, one of the most important journals on Spanish literature of the Golden Age.

Faculty publications regularly appear in such leading journals as Journal of Latin American Studies, Hispamérica, Revista Iberoamericana, Modern Language Notes, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Siglo XX/20th Century, Anales Galdosianos, Film Quarterly, Annali, Sezione Romanza, Bulletin Hispanique, Revista Hispánica, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Archivum Linguisticum, and La Torre. These publications demonstrate the interests and the involvement of the faculty in the development of new perspectives in the study of the Hispanic culture.

Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Professor, Director of Graduate Studies
Ph.D. 1978, University of Chicago
Lou Charnon-Deutsch's earliest training was in the School of Chicago Criticism that strongly influenced her first book, a structuralist study of the artistic short story of 19th century Spain . By the mid-eighties, however, she broadened her interests to include applied feminist theory and psychoanalytic theory. Her following two books examined issues of gender and representation both in well-known 19th century male-authored texts, and in the fiction of both canonical and non-canonical women writers. More recently, she has been working on systems of representation in popular Spanish culture, especially the illustrated Spanish periodicals that are the subject of her most recent book. At present, using an approach that combines cultural anthropology, materialist feminism, and psychoanalytic theory, she is examining the construction of
the imaginary European Gypsy. She has served as President of Feministas Unidas (1992-1994) and is on the MLA Executive Committee of the Division on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Spanish Literature (1997-2001). At Stony Brook, she is an affiliate of Women's Studies and of Comparative Literature.
(631) 632-6031, ldeutsch@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

Román de la Campa, Professor
Ph.D. 1977, University of Minnesota
Román de la Campa is Professor of Latin American, Caribbean , and Comparative Literature. He has written and edited books on theater, literary theory, cultural studies, and testimonio. His essays have appeared in more than 20 journals in Latin America , the United States , and Europe . His current research looks at the ways in which theoretical discourses shape fields of study, particularly Latin Americanism in its various contemporary modes: Postmodern, Feminist, Postcolonial, and Subaltern. It attempts to gain a careful appreciation of the possibilities as well as the contradictions implicit to these approaches. His work also is invested in the advent of a new comparative field comprised of the links between Latin American, American, and Latino literatures as well as other cultural practices. He chairs the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature as well as the New American Studies Program at the University at Stony Brook.
(631) 632-9668, rvdelacampa@notes.cc.sunysb.edu


José Elías-Ulloa , Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 2005, Rutgers University
José Elías-Ulloa is a formal linguist, whose specialization is phonology. His main interests are the study of prosody (syllable weight, metrical stress, intonation) and the interaction with segmental phenomena. In particular, he studies the prosody of indigenous languages in contact with Latin American Spanish as well as the varieties of Spanish that emerge from that contact. He has conducted several fieldtrips in Peru, and research on the Amazonian languages spoken there.
(631) 632-6945, jeliasulloa@notes.cc.sunysb.edu


Daniela Flesler , Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 2001, Tulane University
Daniela Flesler specializes in Contemporary Spanish Peninsular Cultural Studies, with a focus on issues of transnationalism and the construction of national identities. Her book The Return of the Moor: Moroccan Immigration in Contemporary Spain , forthcoming from Purdue UP, examines the anxiety permeating Spain's reception of contemporary Moroccan immigrants through an interdisciplinary analysis of social, fictional and performative texts. It argues that current Spanish social reactions and cultural productions about Moroccans reveal the acute tensions inherent to Spain's liminal position between Europe and Africa. She has published essays in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, Dieciocho and Crítica Hispánica. She is currently working on two book projects: a history of the "Loss of Spain" legend from the 8th to the 21st centuries, and an analysis of Spain's new tourist initiatives in relation to its Muslim and Jewish heritages, in collaboration with Adrián Pérez Melgosa
(631)632-6954 , Daniela.Flesler@stonybrook.edu


Gabriella Polit- Duenas , Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 2002, New York University
Specializing in contemporary Latin American narrative, Gabriela Polit Duenas' studies also include political science and philosophy. Her work focuses gender and the politics of literary writing in twentieth century caudillo novels. In addition, she has published works on Ecuadorian literary criticism. Currently her interests include violence and novels that deal with narcotraffic.
(631)632-6941 , Gabriella.Polit-Duenas@stonybrook.edu

Malcolm K. Read, Professor
Ph.D. 1976, University of Wales
Born in Derby , England , Malcolm Read graduated from the University of Bristol in 1967. Between 1968 and 1980, he was Assistant Professor in Spanish at the University College of Wales, Aberystweyth. He was Visiting Professor in New Zealand in 1977-78, whither he returned on a permanent basis in 1980. He remained in New Zealand until 1993, except for one year spent as a Visiting Professor at the University of the West Indies in Kingston , Jamaica . Since 1993, he has taught at the University at Stony Brook. Much of his early research was in linguistics, notably the history of the discipline, a subject in which he continues to maintain an active interest. Later, he turned to literary theory, and, more specifically, to psychoanalysis and Marxism, which he has combined in the form of a psychoanalytic Marxism. Recently, his work has focused on the construction of subjectivity in the pre- and early-modern periods and, more broadly, upon the epistemological and ontological dimensions of the human sciences. He has published numerous books and articles relating to most areas of Peninsular studies—Medieval, Golden Age, Enlightenment, and Modern—and also of Latin American studies.
(631) 632-6940, mread@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

Victoriano Roncero-López, Professor and Chair
Ph.D. 1987, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain);
Ph.D. 1988, University of Illinois
Born in Valdepeñas, Spain, Victor Roncero-López is a graduate of Spanish and American universities. He was Assistant Professor at the University of Castilla-La Mancha ( Spain ) and at High Point , North Carolina . Since 1995, he has been Professor of Spanish Golden Age Literature since 2002 and has taught at Stony Brook for over a decade. His research and published papers focus on humanist issues, historiography, the Picaresque novel, Petrarchist poetry, Bufoonesque literature, the theory of laughter in 16 th and 17 th centuries, and Autos Sacramentales. He has edited works from medieval Cancionero poetry, Fernando de Herrera, Quevedo, Carlos García, and Calderón. His study of Quevedo's historiography was the first critical approach to the subject and received excellent international reviews. His recent study on humanism examines humanist trends in 16th- and 17th-century Europe through the eyes of Quevedo with a philological approach. He belongs to GRISO, a prestigious Golden Age research team, and is General Editor and Founder of La Perinola: Revista de Investigación Quevediana. He frequently teaches summer courses in European universities.
(631) 632-9669, vroncero@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

Francisco Ordóñez, Associate Professor, Director of Undergraduate Studies Ph.D. 1997 CUNY Graduate Center
Francisco Ordóñez was trained in the study of formal linguistics. His specialization has been the comparative study of the syntax of Spanish, its varieties and other Romance languages such as Catalan, French, Italian and Occitan dialects. His present research involves the study of the syntactic differences of the dialects of Spanish spoken in Latin America and Spain .
(631) 632-1196, fordonez@notes.cc.sunysb.edu



Lilia Delfina Ruiz-Debbe, Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1996, University of Geneva, Switzerland
With a strong foundation in the cognitive epistemology of Piaget at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, Lilia Ruiz-Debbe did her first research on the processes of language structures. At present, her research involves Interlanguage Studies and Second Language Acquisition and its implications for methodology in classroom situations. This research addresses how theoretical frameworks affect the application of research findings to the teaching of Spanish second Language, particularly in aspectual tenses and their L2 acquisition. She is Director of the Spanish Language Program and is responsible for the training of Teaching Assistants in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature.
(631) 631-1349 , ruizdebbe@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

Antonio Vera-León, Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1987, Princeton University
Antonio Vera-León's research is concerned with the 19th-century Caribbean , especially Cuba , and the interrelation between visual culture and literature in 20th-century Latin America . Much of Vera-León's research on the 19th century is mainly concerned with the formation of a “national” narrative tradition within a colonial situation. On the 20th century, his work focuses on the narrative resources of painting and their connection to literary narrative.
(631) 632-6948, averaleon@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

Kathleen M. Vernon, Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1982, University of Chicago
Since receiving her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, Kathleen Vernon has worked in both her teaching and research to develop an interdisciplinary and broadly contextual approach to the study of modern Hispanic literature and culture. In her published work, as well as in her undergraduate and graduate courses, she has analyzed the role of different forms of cultural expression in the context of various periods of Spanish history (the Republic, the Spanish Civil War, Francoism, and the Post-Franco era), especially as related to questions of gender, ethnicity, and national identity. Over the last ten years, she has published widely on various aspects of Spanish cinema from the 1930s to the present. Her current research projects involve the study of cross-national relations among the cinemas of Spain , Latin America, and the U.S. during the “Golden Age” of the 1930s and 1940s. Vernon is also an affiliated faculty member of Women's Studies and is currently Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center .
(631) 632-6942, kvernon@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

ADRIAN PEREZ-MELGOSA , Visiting Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 1995, University of Rochester
Adrian Pérez Melgosa is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at SUNY Stony Brook with a specialization in Contemporary Hispanic Cultural Studies. He received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Rochester. His work explores the intervention of visual and written fiction narratives on the shaping of collective identities in the Americas and Europe. His current research studies 20th century popular narratives of the Americas in search for patterns of representation of cross-cultural relationships in the continent. His book in progress, Imaginary Policies and Real Fictions: Metaphors of Hemispheric Otherness in the Americas studies the role fiction has played in providing metaphoric structures to explain the uneven distribution of economic and political power among the different communities of the Americas. He has published essays in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Scribner's American Writers Series, Letras Femeninas , and Monteagudo Revista de Literatura Comparada .
(631) 632-1835, aperezmelgosa@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

Flora Klein-Andreu, Associate Professor, Emerita
Ph.D. 1973, Columbia University
Born in Barcelona, Spain, Flora Klein-Andreu received her Ph.D. in General Linguistics, with Spanish as her language of specialization. She has taught at Hunter College, Georgetown University, the University of Caracas (Venezuela), and the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (Spain). Her main interest is the analysis of meaning in grammar (in grammatical elements, constructions, word order, etc.) and its many implications, especially for the historical development of grammatical elements and for second language learning. Her research deals with these issues, mainly in Spanish. Other professional interests include sociolinguistics and the relation of theory to data. General interests include education and music.
fkleinandreu@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

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