Dr. Pedro Vizoso, Assistant Professor of Foreign Languages at Hastings College, has earned the institution’s first Faculty Development Fund Award to study a largely forgotten Jewish Venezuelan poet. Made possible through generous donors, the award carries a grant up to $2,500 and is awarded on a competitive basis.
“As recipient of the HC First Faculty Development Fund Award, I want to say thanks for opportunity to make true one of the dreams of my scholarly life,” Vizoso said. “It is about recovering and republishing the work of the Jewish Venezuelan poet Elías David Curiel (1871-1924) — in my opinion one of the most appealing of the Hispanic modernist age, but only locally known and almost forgotten. It is about to have the world discover the intensity and beauty of work and to bestow it the importance it deserves.”
The award, coordinated by Hastings College’s Academic Affairs Office and given on an annual basis, broadly defines faculty development as related research, professional service in one’s discipline, or instructional development. In keeping with the donors’ wishes, each grant will allow, or subsidize, a faculty member to do something that he/she would otherwise not be able to do.
Vizoso is grateful the anonymous donors established the fund.
He said: “It is difficult to find words to describe to what extent [their] generosity is going to change lives.”
Bio for Dr. Pedro Vizoso
Pedro J. Vizoso, born in Xinzo de Limia (Ourense), Spain, in 1959, holds a Master of Arts degree from New Mexico State University (2006) and a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona (2010). He lived in Venezuela for ten years. Since 2004, he lives and works in the United States, and has been teaching Spanish language and culture in Hastings College since the fall of 2010. His specialty is Hispanic Modernism and Transatlantic Studies. His doctoral dissertation —a cultural approach to Madrilenian bohemianism mainly focused on Spanish poetry from the Elizabethan period to the heyday of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship (1864-1927)— has been accepted recently for publication by Universitas Castellae and is currently in print (2015). He is the author of several books of poetry and wrote also a monograph on the work of the Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini. Since 1995 he has been translating nineteenth-century French poetry into the Spanish. In this field, his major achievement is his Spanish edition of Gérard de Nerval’s poetical works, published in 1999. He is happily married to Bea, now a para-educator in Longfellow Elementary School, and is the proud and happy father of two (16 and 9).
