Alejandro Alonso
Alejandro Alonso is Assistant Professor in the Brooklyn College Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. A native of Spain, he specializes in late 19th-century intellectual history and modernism in literature. His most recent publications include "Cinco propuestas para el estudio del Modernismo" (Hesperia) and "Para una edición crítica de La Sirena Negra: Notas de un manuscrito" (Boletín de la Biblioteca Menendez Pelayo). His current research centers on regionalism, nationalism, and literature in the Spanish novel. He is also working on a project on the construction of Spanish literarary institutions during the Modernist period.
Professor Alonso will teach Spanish 3 in the January 2009 program in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
Malva Filer
Malva Filer is Professor in the Brooklyn College Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. She has published widely on the literature of the Fantastic in Argentina and Uruguay, the fictionalization of history, and collective and personal memory in literature. Her most recent publications include "Autobiografía y autoficción en El Arte de perder de Napoleón Baccino Ponce de León" (Alba de América), and "Genealogía, memoria histórica e identidad personal en Santo Oficio de la Memoria de Mempo Giardinelli" (Actas del XV Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas). She co-edited with J. Arancibia and R. Tezanos-Pinto La reunión de lejanías by María Rosa Lojo, and published critical editions of Una mujer de fin de siglo, also by Lojo, and Maluco, La novela de los descubridores by Napoleón Baccino Ponce de León.
A native of Argentina's Entre Ríos province, Prof. Filer teaches the Literature of the Fantastic course in the January 2009 program.
Mark McMeley
Mark McMeley is Substitute Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Brooklyn College. He is also an adjunct instructor in the Summer Study Abroad program in Buenos Aires with the Gallatin School of New York University. In the 1980s, Professor McMeley initiated an archive for farming communities in Uruguay’s Colonia province that were founded in the mid-19th century by immigrants from the Piedmont region of northwest Italy. He lived worked and researched in neighboring Argentina in the decade of the 1990s. His research centers on 19th century liberal reform projects, such as education, temperance and the abolition of bullfighting, and the response by local populations in the interior provinces of 19th century Argentina. Most recently, he published "Teacher Training and the Promise of Social Ascent: The Case of Argentina's Normal Schools, 1871-1881" (The Latin Americanist).
A novice at tango but an accomplished cebador, or preparer, of mate, Professor McMeley will teach the SPAN 18.50 course on the cultures of the River Plate nations in the January 2009 program.
Guest lecturers
Eugenia Contarini
Eugenia Contarini is an attorney with the Latin American regional office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. She holds her law degree from the University of Buenos Aires, and has had a number of positions in UNHCR relating to economic and political refugees in South America. Dr. Contarini speaks to our group on the plight of South America’s internal refugees and the immigrants who are arriving from overseas.
Luis Niveiro
Luis Niveiro is an artist from Corrientes province who has resided in Buenos Aires since the early 1980s. He has exhibited throughout Latin America and has earned numerous awards in Argentina and abroad. The Brooklyn College program visits Luis’s studio to learn more about the work of artists in the context of Latin America’s economic and political changes.
Jorge Schellemberg
Jorge Schellemberg is a recording musician from Montevideo who has performed in Uruguay and abroad, blending contemporary rock with the rhythms of Uruguay’s candombe music. Jorge talks to our group on the many influences in contemporary Uruguayan music, often accompanying our group when we explore the murgas and comparsas that are preparing for the Carnaval season.
Lic. Ana Weinstein
Ana Weinstein holds the licenciatura in sociology and is the director of the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Argentine Republic, headquartered at the AMIA (Asociación Mutualista Israelita de Argentina), in Palermo, Buenos Aires. Prof. Weinstein has researched the Jewish experience throughout Argentina, and speaks to our class on ethnicity and the construction of Argentine national identity.
