Noel Valis
Areas of interest: nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish literature, history, and culture; comparative literature; interdisciplinary approaches to modern Spanish culture; Spanish Civil War; religion and literature; Federico García Lorca.
In 2010 Valis published Sacred Realism: Religion and the Imagination in Modern Spanish Narrative (Yale University Press) andLa cultura de la cursilería: Mal gusto, clase y kitsch en la España moderna (Antonio Machado Libros, Col. Pensamiento).
She is the author of The Decadent Vision in Leopoldo Alas: A Study of “La Regenta” and “Su único hijo” (LSU Press, 1981); The Novels of Jacinto Octavio Picón (Bucknell University Press, 1986; Spanish trans., 1991), and Reading the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Novel: Selected Essays (Juan de la Cuesta, 2005).
Valis’s The Culture of Cursilería: Bad Taste, Kitsch and Class in Modern Spain (Duke University Press) won the Modern Language Association’s 2003 Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize.
Her translation of Burning Cartography, poetry by Noni Benegas (Host Publications, 2007; 2nd ed., 2011), won the New England Council of Latin American Studies Best Book Translation Prize in 2008.
She has also translated Pedro Salinas’s Víspera del gozo (Prelude to Pleasure) (1993); Las conjuradoras: Antología bilingüe de seis poetas norteamericanas de hoy (1993); The Poetry of Julia Uceda (1995); and The Poetry of Sara Pujol Russell (2005).
Valis’s bibliographical work includes Leopoldo Alas (Clarín): An Annotated Bibliography (1986) and Leopoldo Alas (Clarín): An Annotated Bibliography. Supplement I (2002).
She is the editor of In the Feminine Mode: Essays on Hispanic Women Writers (with Carol Maier) (1990; 2nd ed., 1995); “Malevolent Insemination” and Other Essays on Clarín (1990); Jacinto Octavio Picón’s La hijastra del amor (1990); José María de Pereda’s Bocetos al temple(Obras completas, vol. 3, 1990); and Carolina Coronado’s Poesías (1991). In 2007, she edited Teaching Representations of the Spanish Civil War(Modern Language Association).
Her poetry appears in Mi casa me recuerda / My House Remembers Me (2003).
Valis is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.
Recently appointed to the Editorial Board of PMLA (2013-15), she has served on 28 boards of journals and presses.
Forthcoming is Two Confessions, essays by María Zambrano and Rosa Chacel, translated by Noël Valis and Carol Maier, with an introduction, afterword, and annotations (SUNY Press).