Talk: «The Return of the Conversos: Contemporary Narratives of the Sephardi Jewish Past in the Americas» by Dr. Dalia Kandiyoti – 13 OCT 2021

Wednesday October 13, 2021 • Zoom

12:00 PM – 1:30 PM

Please note Texas is on Central Daylight Time.

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Long considered “disappeared,” Iberian converts of the medieval and early modern periods and their descendants have returned to the contemporary political, cultural, and literary scene in fascinating and complicated ways. In her talk, Dalia Kandiyoti explains what gave rise to the current cultural interest in the history of the mass conversions of Spanish and Portuguese Jews to Christianity and their dispersal to the Americas. She discusses recent fictional and memoir texts about this past as well as oral histories of individuals in Latin America and the U.S. who have applied for Spanish or Portuguese citizenship as descendants of conversos.

Dalia Kandiyoti is Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. She is the author of two books, The Converso’s Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature (Stanford University Press) and Migrant Sites: America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures (Dartmouth/University Press of New England) and of numerous articles and a special journal issue about diasporas and exiles in the Americas and Sephardi literatures. Currently she is at work, with Dr. Rina Benmayor, on an oral history collection and an edited volume about the 2015 laws in Spain and Portugal for Sephardi descendants.

Sponsored by: Sponsored by: Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Program in Comparative Literature, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies

Fuente: liberalarts.utexas.edu