Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program Presents Talk with Leyla Rouhi
Washington and Lee University will present a lecture by Leyla Rouhi, Preston S. Parish ’41 Third Century Professor of Romance Languages at Williams College, on March 15 at 4 p.m. in Payne Hall 201.
Rouhi’s talk, which is free and open to the public, is titled “A Radical Reassessment of Accepted Wisdom on Miguel de Cervantes’ Fiction on Islam.”
Rouhi teaches and researches a wide range of topics in the areas of medieval and early modern Mediterranean, particularly Islam and Spain, Cervantes, translation history and theory, and Islam in the European Middle Ages. She also pursues interests in contemporary Iranian culture and politics.
She has served as director of the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Williams College, and in 2010 was named Massachusetts Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation.
“Rouhi earned her doctorate at Harvard under the guidance of one of the most prominent Cervantists of his generation, Francisco Márquez Villanueva, and to this day is the most engaging teacher of Cervantes I’ve ever had,” said Elizabeth Spragins, visiting assistant professor of Spanish at W&L. “I still remember an economics professor at Williams telling me as a freshman that he had learned more from an hour’s lecture on ‘Don Quixote’ that Leyla gave than in an entire semester’s course on the text.”
This talk is sponsored in part by W&L’s Middle East and South Asia Studies Program, Romance Languages and Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program.
