The Department of Spanish and Portuguese would like to congratulate SPPO graduate student Angela Acosta on winning third place in the Humanities section at the 36th Annual Hayes Research Forum that was held on Friday, March 4, 2022. Angela received the award for her project, Memorializing the Spanish Avant-Garde: The Gendered Dynamics of Inclusion in Homages to the Generation of 1927.  

The project focuses on early 20th century Spanish women writers, more specifically the generation of 1927, and looks at how we can restructure the literary canon in the 21st century and how we can better represent the cultural milieu of that time period. Through her research, Angela noticed that the voices of women writers were not being represented and their stories were not being told. Even in the archive of the generation of 1927 in Málaga, Spain, the preservation for the archive has been focused on these 10 male poets and their work and homages to them, so there were not a lot of materials available on women Angela could use for her project. This started to make her think about all of these archival erasures and what people are doing now in Spain. She cited, “There is a lot of great scholarship happening where people are in archives recovering these materials or even making phone calls to people who personally knew these writers.” In her project, Angela focuses on how we can find these stories, what stories are being told, and regarding the information we cannot find, how can we look for and locate these materials. Specifically, Angela’s project explores how we can use homages, tributes like performances, and written tributes of women writers in the generation of 1927 to find new ways of representing artistic and cultural life in that time period.  

When asked about her experience at the Hayes Research Forum, Angela said, “I was really excited because I got to volunteer there when I was a first-year graduate student and I saw people in our department present in the humanities group. When I was volunteering, I thought this is so cool, I really want to do this when I am a dissertation student. So, I submitted an abstract and was excited to have that experience. It was really nice to connect with the other presenters as well. We were able to talk to each other, and there was just a really wide representation of projects and departments, even within the humanities. Overall, it was a bit nerve racking because I was the first person to present, but an amazing experience nonetheless.”  

Congratulations on this wonderful recognition, Angela!