María Soledad Barbón Receives Honorable Mention for MLA’s Scaglione Prize

María Soledad Barbón, professor of comparative literature in the UMass Amherst department of languages, literatures and cultures, has been recognized by the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) for her book “Spanish Fascist Writing.” The book received an honorable mention from MLA for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature.

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“Spanish Fascist Writing” presents the first collection of Spanish fascist texts in English translation and offers an intellectual and political history of fascist writing in Spain. It includes manifestos, newspaper articles, essays, letters and pieces of prose fiction that demonstrate why the Spanish case proves essential to a comprehensive understanding of fascism in general.

Of Barbon’s book, the Scaglione Prize committee said, “‘Spanish Fascist Writing’ is a timely collection of texts, including manifestos, speeches, and letters, arranged to introduce readers to a wide spectrum of themes. Together these texts enrich our understanding of right-wing extremism in Spain and worldwide in the past and present. The collection also adds to our interpretation of the historical genealogies of European fascism. Justin Crumbaugh and Nil Santiáñez, as editors of the anthology, provide a useful history of Spanish fascism, a bibliographic essay, and notes, all of which add to the book’s value as a teaching resource. As translators, with María Soledad Barbón, they are aware of the rhetoric of this particular manifestation of fascism and thus are careful to convey the nuances and stylistic idiosyncrasies of every text.”

Barbón holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Cologne, Germany. Her research and teaching interests include the literature and cultural history of colonial Latin America, transatlantic studies, Hemispheric Studies, anthropophagy and colonial festivals. She is the author of Peruanische Satire am Vorabend der Unabhängigkeit (1770-1800) and Colonial Loyalties: Celebrating the Spanish Monarchy in Eighteenth-Century Lima. She has received several awards including two research grants from the DAAD (German Academic Research Service) and a post-doctoral fellowship from the Andrew-Mellon Foundation for research at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Before joining the department of languages, literatures and cultures she held appointments at the University of Cologne, the University of Michigan and the University of Washington.