[Due to COVID-19, this event has been moved to a digital conferencing platform. For more information about participation, contact IRH at info@irh.wisc.edu]
Monday Seminar:
Ignacio López Alemany
Biruté Ciplijauskaité Fellow (2019-2020)
Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
This presentation focuses on the vihuela not only as a musical instrument but as a representative sample to tell a larger story, the one of a country at the time of its most radical transformation. The history of a land trying to shake off its Semitic past to reclassify itself as a Classical nation, and rightful heir of the Roman Empire. And, finally, a story of a kingdom in need of creating a new narrative for its past, a new political system its present, and a timeless language that legitimizes its newly found primacy among the rest of European nations. A close examination of the rise and fall of vihuela music in sixteenth-century Spain illuminates hidden aspects often overlooked by conventional political, literary, and musical histories and brings them all together…harmoniously.
Ignacio López Alemany is associate professor of Spanish at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and editor of Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry. He has edited the libretti of two operas by José de Cañizares and Giacomo Facco, Las amazonas de España (1720) and La hazaña mayor de Alcides (1723) (Iberoamericana, 2018). He is the author of the monograph Ilusión áulica e imaginación caballeresca en El cortesano de Luis Milán (UNC Press, 2013). Along with Jason McCloskey, he co-edited the volume Signs of Power in Habsburg Spain and the New World (Bucknell UP, 2013). He is also co-author, with J. E. Varey, of El teatro palaciego en Madrid: 1707–1724. Estudio y documentos (Tamesis, 2006). He is a member of the International Research Group IULCE (Instituto Universitario “La Corte en Europa,” at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain) and of the International Research Group CELES XVII-XVIII (Centro de Estudios de Literatura de Entre Siglos XVII-XVII, Université de Poitiers, France). He is the Biruté Ciplijauskaité fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities for the academic year 2019-2020.