The Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature sorrowfully announces the death on June 24 of our beloved colleague, Adrían Pérez Melgosa, Associate Professor and former Director of the Stony Brook Humantities Institute. An innovative and inspiring teacher and mentor, Adrián directed multiple undergraduate, MA and PhD theses, working with students from the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature as well as Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. He also served as Director of Graduate Studies. As a scholar, his research explored the intervention of visual and written fiction narratives on the shaping of collective identities in the Americas and Europe.
A graduate of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the University of Rochester, Adrián’s articles have appeared in Social Text, American Quarterly and the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, among other journals. His 2012 book, Cinema and Inter-American Relations: Tracking Transnational Affect (Routledge) studies the key role that commercial narrative films have played in the articulation of the political and cultural relationship between the United States and Latin America since the onset of the 1933 Good Neighbor policy.
His most recent book, The Memory Work of Jewish Spain (Indiana University Press, 2020), co-authored with Daniela Flesler, explores the phenomenon of the “re-discovery” of Spain’s Jewish heritage. Through oral interviews, visits to museums and newly reconfigured “Jewish quarters” and Jewish memory sites, and the analysis of literature, cultural performances, tourist promotional materials and political discourse, the book explores the recent cultural and political initiatives that seek to memorialize and reconnect Spain with its Jewish past in the context of the long history of Spain’s ambivalence towards its Jewish heritage. The book earned the 2021 National Jewish Book Award, in the category Sephardic Culture, sponsored by the Jewish Book Council. The NJBA is the longest-running North American awards program of its kind and is recognized as one of the most prestigious.
Adrián co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, “Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era”; it was republished in an expanded edition by Routledge in 2013. The volume of essays explores the different and contradictory ways in which Spain as a nation has tried to come to terms with its Jewish memory and with the absence/presence of Sephardic Jews from the 19th century to the present.
He also directed the digital humanities research project, “Cultural and Social Map of Latino Long Island,” funded by a three-year grant (2016-2018) from the Hagedorn Foundation. This interactive online map provides a visual rendering of historical, cultural and statistical information and includes a series of oral histories captured in video interviews, with the goal of making visible the social, economic and cultural contributions of the growing Latino population on Long Island.
Information on a memorial service will be announced at a later date.