Estoria project research fellow Fiona Maguire has written the following blog for the blog of the Modern Languages and Cultures department at the University of Liverpool. It was first published here on Friday 5th August. Fiona has kindly allowed us to reproduce the text of the blog on our website.
Professor Emeritus Roger Wright honoured by the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language
Modern Languages and Cultures‘ Professor Emeritus Roger Wright has recently been honoured by the Real Academia Española (Royal Academy of the Spanish Language) (RAE), who have conferred membership on him as ‘académico correspondiente extranjero’ (international Academy member).
As Professor of Spanish at the University of Liverpool, Professor Wright gained wide international scholarly renown for his investigations into the evolution of Spanish and other Romance languages and the invention of Medieval Latin; his books include Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France (1982) and A Sociophilological Study of Late Latin (2003). Professor Wright is also a scholar, translator and performer of the Spanish ballad tradition.
Modern Languages and Cultures now numbers two Spanish Academicians amongst its ranks, a number only equalled or exceeded in UK universities by the University of Oxford (3 Spanish Academicians).
Membership of the RAE was similarly conferred in 2009 on Professor Emerita Dorothy Severin, FSA, hon. OBE, Professor of Spanish at the University of Liverpool, former Gilmour Chair of Spanish (the first established Chair of Spanish in a UK university) and former General Editor of the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (a scholarly journal devoted to Hispanic studies, founded in 1926 by a member of the Department at the University of Liverpool, where it continues to be published by Liverpool University Press). Professor Severin’s research interests in late Medieval Spanish literature include La Celestina and cancionero studies; her internationally acknowledged scholarly publications include Memory in ‘La Celestina’ (1970), an early study of the uses of cultural memory in literature and the cancionero digital library ‘An E-Library of 15th Century Castilian Cancionero Manuscripts’ (2007-).
Founded in 1713, the scholarly activities of the RAE are devoted to the Spanish language and its literature. The Academy compiles and publishes the Diccionario de la lengua española (the Spanish equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary) and includes amongst its illustrious members the novelists Javier Marías and Mario Vargas Llosa, together with academic scholars of Spanish, now joined by two Academicians from the University of Liverpool.