News from Vanderbilt University

Cathy Jrade

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Cathy L. Jrade, a Vanderbilt University professor and chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to write a book on Delmira Agustini, the first major female poet of twentieth-century Spanish America.

The award, which was announced on Feb. 9, carries a stipend of $40,000. NEH fellowships support individuals pursuing advanced research that contributes to scholarly knowledge or the general public’s understanding of the humanities.

Agustini (1886-1914) was born in Uruguay and is one of the youngest poets belonging to the literary movement known as modernismo, the first Spanish-language movement to originate in the Western Hemisphere. Agustini began her career quite young and immediately garnered favor among contemporaries. In her personal life, she cultivated a reserved if not childish image, which coincided with expectations for middle- and upper-class women of the time. In contrast, her writing grew increasingly erotic and defiantly sexual. Her death at age 27 at the hands of her ex-husband, whom she had taken as her lover, contribute to the mystery and myth that surround her.

“My book will show that more than simply coming to affirm in her poetry her sexual nature and rejecting the limitations placed upon her by traditional views of women, Agustini chooses a sexual model to combat the sense of weakness and ineffectuality suggested by artistic imitation,” Jrade said. “By reading Agustini’s erotic verse as a poetics of a new female self, my study will reveal previously unnoticed statements about art, love and creation and will reach conclusions applicable to many other female poets.”

Professor Jrade earned a doctorate degree from Brown University in 1974 and came to Vanderbilt in 1987 from Indiana University. Her research centers on Spanish American poetry, and her books include Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity and Modernismo, Modernity and the Development of Spanish American Literature.

Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu