Speaker: Dr. Rocío Ortuño Casanova
　Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish Literature, UNED (Open University)
　Director, Laboratorio de Innovación en Humanidades Digitales (LINDH)

Title: New Approaches to Philippine Literary History: New Materials and New Methodologies

Abstract:
Philippine literature in Spanish has been a neglected area in the study of Spanish-language literatures: from the Philippines, the lack of knowledge of the Spanish language during the twentieth century has hindered its study. From Spain, the dispersion of materials and the use of this literature for propagandistic and nationalistic purposes has limited rigorous research. Nowadays, the digital turn offers us a new opportunity to approach Philippine literature in Spanish from three angles: (1) on the one hand, the recovery and availability of digitized materials gives us the opportunity to considerably expand the canon by including ephemeral materials such as newspapers. (2) on the other hand, digital methodologies allow us quantitative and more objective studies with which to recompose the panorama of the Philippine literary field in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (3) Finally, it offers us tools for the transmission and dissemination of knowledge obtained through research by means of MOOCs and virtual exhibitions, for example. In this talk, an overview of Spanish-Filipino literature since the late 19th century will be presented, using digital materials and methodologies created from several recent projects, and that can be applied to the study of other literatures and their histories.

About the speaker:
Rocío Ortuño Casanova is a member of the Department of Spanish Literature and professor of Hispanic literatures at the UNED (Spanish Open University) and director of the Laboratory of Innovation in Digital Humanities at the same university, based in Madrid, Spain. She has worked at the Universiteit Antwerpen in Belgium, at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, and at several universities in the United Kingdom, including the University of Manchester, where she obtained her PhD. Her main line of research focuses on the study of literary and cultural contacts between the Philippines and the global Hispanophone between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. On this topic, she has co-edited three books: The Challenge of Modernity in Hispano-Philippine Literature (1885-1935); Transnational Philippines: Cultural Encounters in Philippine Literature in Spanish; and Introduction to Hispano-Philippine Literature. She has been the Principal Investigator of the PhilPeriodicals project, which facilitated the digitization of the University of the Philippines’ historical newspaper repository and its research using digital methodologies, and the DigiPhiLit project on Philippine Literature, Digital Humanities, and Distance Education. On Digital Humanities, she is also co-editor of the book Digital Humanities in the Teaching of Hispanic Literatures. Practical Applications.