Un partido de tenis en la Roma de 1599, como sucedáneo de un duelo de honor, entre Caravaggio y Quevedo, con una pelota hecha, como todas las mejores de entonces, con pelo humano. Bajo ese sorprendente escenario –sólo parcialmente imaginado—y en los tres sets que dura el juego ubica el escritor Álvaro Enrigue (México, 1969) Muerte súbita, con la que ha obtenido los 18.000 euros de un 31º premio Herralde de novela que ha registrado la participación más alta de la historia del galardón: 476 originales.

Continue Reading

Giancarlo Mazzanti, who is spending the fall semester teaching at PLAS, is featured in the exhibition “9+1 Ways of Being Political” which just opened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) in New York. The exhibit will be on view until March 2013:

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1313

Earlier in the summer Giancarlo’s work was featured in a New York Times article on Colombia:

New York Times: Past Its Golden Moment, Bogotá Clings to Hope

Giancarlo will be giving a talk about his work on November 6th at 12:00pm in 219 Burr Hall.

Ambassador Ricardo Luna is spending the spring semester as a visiting fellow in the Program in Latin American Studies. A career diplomat with over twenty years of experience as Peruvian ambassador, he has served as Peruvian ambassador to the United States, the United Kingdom, and the United Nations. Before coming to Princeton, Ambassador Luna has taught at Harvard, Brown, Columbia, and the Fletcher School.

Paulo Fontes, the author of Um nordeste em São Paulo: trabalhadores migrantes em São Miguel Paulista (1945-66), (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 2009) is the winner of the first Thomas E. Skidmore Prize, sponsored by the National Archive, Rio de Janeiro and the Brazilian Studies Association. The $5,000 prize is to support the translation of the book so that it can be published in English. The prize, endowed through a generous donation of the Skidmore family, recognizes historical works on twentieth-century Brazilian history. The first prize competition considered books covering the period 1930-64 that had been published in Portuguese between 2004 and 2010.

Three additional works received Honorable Mention: Regina Horta Duarte, A biologia militante: o Museu Nacional, especialização científica, divulgação do conhecimento e práticas políticas no Brasil – 1926-1945 (Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2010); Jorge Ferreira, O imaginário trabalhista: getulismo, PTB e cultura política popular 1945-1964 (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2005); and Antonio Luigi Negro, Linhas de montagem: industrialismo nacional-desenvolvimentista e a sindicalização dos trabalhadores (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2004).

The Prize Committee was composed of James N. Green, (Chair), Ângela Maria Casto Gomes, Luís Edmundo de Souza Moraes, Maria Helena Capelato, and Vitor Manoel Marques da Fonseca. The next Skidmore Prize will be awarded in 2013 and will consider works published in Portuguese between 2006 and 2012 covering the period 1964-85.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has appointed Ricardo V. Luna ’62, a professor and former ambassador from Peru, as a distinguished visiting scholar at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. Luna will be teaching at Princeton this spring as a PLAS visiting scholar.

Read the full press release

Five days after the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he walked into a Princeton classroom where 25 students awaited their weekly seminar on the magical realism of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

And then, said one astounded undergraduate, he pretended nothing had happened.

“Thank you very, very much,” he said, smiling broadly, according to students who were there and had presented him with a card and a spread of baked goods. “We’ll eat this during the break. But for now, let’s start class.”

Continue reading this article in the New York Times

Ese día, como todos los días desde que, hace tres semanas, llegamos a Nueva York, me levanté a las cinco de la mañana y, procurando no despertar a Patricia, me fui a la salita a leer. Era noche cerrada todavía y las luces de los rascacielos del contorno tenían la apariencia inquietante de una gigantesca bandada de cocuyos invadiendo la ciudad.

Read the full article in El País

Acclaimed Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who is spending this semester as the 2010 Distinguished Visitor in Princeton University’s Program in Latin American Studies, has been awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature. He also is a visiting lecturer in Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing and the Lewis Center for the Arts.

New York Times article | Princeton University article