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2014 Barcelona Symposium

Mar 26, 2014 12:00pm -

Mar 28, 2014 10:00pm

(GMT-10)

Event Type: Symposium

Category: Symposium

Speaker Information

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Enric Ucelay Da Cal
Senior Professor Emeritus, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

"On the Waterfront: What Constitutes a "Port City" in Historical Perspective?"

Enric Ucelay-Da Cal in a Senior Professor (catedrático in Spanish; catedràtic in Catalan) at the Univeristat Pompeu Fabra, with emeritus status. He previously taught for many years at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and occasionally at other academic centers, such as Duke University in the U.S., or Venice International Univeristy in Italy.

He was born in New York City in 1948. He is the son of Spanish Republican exiles who were fortunate enough to be able to establish themselves in the United States in 1939, and have long university careers in Iberian Studies. He studied as an undergraduate at Bard College, and completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University. He came to Barcelona to research a doctoral dissertation on Catalan radical nationalism. He has resided in this Mediterranean port for over forty years, with his wife.

Ucelay-Da Cal's interest in nationalism comes his turbulent relationship whith his father, who, by championing the use of Portuguese spelling and grammar in the Galician or Gallegan language (rather than Castilian syntax), became a major inspiration for the most radical wing of that movement. Accordingly, Ucelay-Da Cal has dedicated himself to the study of nationalisms "both inside and outside", as a form of confrontational discourse, without prejudice regarding the presumptions of either side in the structural conflict. He has written extensively on Catalan as well as Spanish nationalism, along with other subjects. A good proportion of his scholarly articles may be found online, in pdf format, at enricucelaydacal.weebly.com.