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Christina Karageorgou-Bastea
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 I graduated from the National and Kapodistrian University of Greece in Athens, with a BA in Philology, and a specialty in Byzantine and Modern Greek Literature. In 1989, I went for the first time to Mexico, where I spent the next nine years, first in Xalapa and then in México, DF. I studied first at the Unversidad Veracruzana, from 1989 to 1994. I obtained my MA in Mexican literature, in 1994, with a thesis on Xavier Villaurrutia, one of the most important Mexican poets of the generation of Los Contemproáneos. My thesis examines the relation between Villaurrutia's essays an his poetics as it is crafted in Nostalgia de la muerte. Between 1993 and 1998, I did my Ph.D. at the Colegio de México, form where I graduated with a dissertation on Federico García Lorca and the Poema del cante jondo.
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 In May 2008, my book, Arquitectónica de voces. Federico García Lorca y el Poema del cante jondo, was published in México, by El Colegio de México Press. This long interpretive essay proposes a new hermeneutical outlook to poetic texts, wishing to push the conceptual boundaries of what has been thought of as lyric poetry in modern and modernist contexts. My principal endeavor is to map Lorca’s lyric voice and its multifaceted nature. My findings triggered the question about how vocal hybridity works towards dismantling the lyric tendency towards solipsism. In Lorca’s book, different textual agents and agencies rise from multifaceted discursive sources and are orchestrated in startlingly engaging polyphonic arrangements. Although related to a specific text my analytical approach unveils the limitations of bounding lyric discourse to a unique agent and voice, and conceiving it as a monological enunciation par excellence. In this sense, my book aims at showing how the groundbreaking work of García Lorca allows for a reshaping of the most distinct feature of a literary genre: the solipsistic vocal source of the lyric self.
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In the field of peninsular literature, I have worked extensively on the Generación del 27, Cernuda, Salinas and Lorca; on Valle-Inclán’s Tirano Banderas and Luces de bohemia; on Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina. My interests encompass Spanish Drama from the early modern period and the nineteenth century. I have published two articles on Cervantes’s La Numancia, and an essay on Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino. I have a continuous interest in modern Latin American literature as well and I worked on Cristina Peri Rossi’s poetry, Babel bárbara and Las musas inquietantes; on Jorge Luis Borges, the Mexicans Abigael Bohórquez and Elena Garro, the Chilean Pablo Neruda. Throughout 2009, together with my colleague Cathy L. Jrade, I have proposed two colloquia on poetry, from which we hope a critical anthology will also stem. The first one took already place in Nashville with a great deal of success. This project, funded through a generous grant by the Center for the Americas at Vanderbilt, has gathered fourteen of the most prominent scholars and poets from the US, Europe and Latin-America, who examine different ways in which Hispanic poetry is read at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As organizers of these two events and editors of the anthology, we direct our questions to the exploration of intersections, oppositions, differences, and productive counterpoints that inform critical thinking on poetry. It is precisely with the prospect of provocative conflict, disagreement, and dissidence that we undertake this assessment of the vital signs of poetic output at this time. http://http://www.vanderbilt.edu/spanport/Colloquium%20Poetry%20and%20Poetic
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During 2008-2009, I am exploring new theoretical grounds in my effort to found my research on Lope de Aguirre and cultural memory; Borges, blindness and witnessing; Cernuda, the prose poem and exile, by participating as a fellow in the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities annual seminar, on “New Directions in Trauma Studies.” In this intense environment of intellectual exchange, I am broadening the scope of my knowledge on theoretical issues related to trauma as a cause and a place of representation in literature, media and visual arts, and history.
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