Department News

Distinguished Visiting Professor - Leonardo Romero Tobar

18 November 2008

Leonardo Romero Tobar will be our Distinguished Visiting Professor in Peninsular literature and culture in Spring 2009. He will teach two courses, one undergraduate class, Spanish 465, “The Idea of Nation in Modern Spanish Literature,” and a graduate seminar, Spanish 874, “Epistolarity in Travel Literature.”

Professor Romero Tobar holds he position of “Catedrático de Literatura Española” at the University of Zaragoza. Prior to that he taught at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid and the University of Santiago de Compostela. His licenciatura and doctorate are both from the Universidad Complutense. He has considerable experience of academia in North America: he has been a visiting scholar at Princeton University and Indiana University, a visiting professor at the University of Ottawa, and he has also taught for U.S. universities’ programs based in Madrid.

While his doctoral dissertation was on the subject of dramatic theory in Spain, 1800-1870, many of his publications have been concerned with nineteenth-century Peninsular narrative, especially Juan Valera and Leopoldo Alas. He has an edition of Pepita Jiménez published by Cátedra and one of Teresa published by Castalia. Other authors whom he has edited and on whom he has published include Larra and Bécquer, and he has also worked on Romanticism, travel literature and Goya. More recently, he has been particularly concerned with Spanish literary historiography, and has been at the forefront of a recent move in Peninsular criticism to take a radically revisionist look at how Spanish literary history is written and constructed. These interests are reflected in the collective volume Historia literaria / Historia de la literatura (Universidad de Zaragoza, 2004), of which he was general editor, and his monograph La literatura en su historia (Arco-Libro, 2006).

Professor Romero Tobar will be a visiting professor at the University of Virginia in Spring 2009. He will be teaching Spanish 465, Spanish Narrative, and Spanish 874, Modern Literature: “Las cartas de viaje”. During his stay he will be resident on the lawn.