Michael Schinasi

Associate Professor
Hispanic Studies
Board of Directors, Fulbright Association Spain Interest Group<
Fulbright Mentor
Board of Directors, State Chapter of the Fulbright Association
252-328-6543 (phone)
252-328-6233 (fax)
schinasim@ecu.edu
Bate 3309 (office)
Dept. Foreign Languages & Literatures
East Carolina University Mailstop #556
Greenville, NC 27858-4353

Education

  • PhD, University of Washington, Spanish, June 1983
  • MA, University of Washington, Spanish, June 1973
  • BA, State University of New York at Binghamton (Harpur College), Humanities major with a specialization in Spanish, June, 1971

Areas of Interest

  • 18th – 20th Century Literature and Culture of Spain
  • Spanish Theater
  • The Jews of Spain

Recent Courses

  • Ecocriticism (Selected Spanish Texts, 16th – 20th century)
  • Sociability in Spain: The Café (Spanish texts from Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos to Camilo José Cela)
  • Introduction to Cultural Analysis

Book Publications

  • Ventura de la Vega and El hombre de mundo: At the Threshold of the Realist Period in Spain (Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2015; Reviewed in  Hispania  99(2016), 693-94.) The book has its origins in Friedrich Engels’ view that in the family women play the role of the working class. It sees gender as a mediating factor between the individual and society and consciousness of it in the mid 1800s as a precursor to social class consciousness that becomes important in great realist literature later in the century.
  • Critical edition,  Ventura de la Vega, Poemas, ed., intro. and notes by Michael Schinasi (Salamanca: Grupo de Estudios del Siglo XVIII-Universidad de Salamanca, 2005 [appeared in 2006]). Reviewed in The Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 84 [2007], 1080.

Current Projects

An English language prose translation of La familia a la moda (1805) by María Rosa de Gálvez

“How Spain’s First National Theater Came into Existence,” under revision for further evaluation by PMLA

A book tentatively titled, The Economy of Theater and the Rise of the Nineteenth Century Novel in Spain

Selected Articles

  • “Zarzuela and the Rise of the Labour Movement in Spain,” Popular Entertainment Studies, 8 (2017), 20-37.
  • “Down and Dirty: ‘Fitzcaraldo Stories’ from the Archives (On the Café del Príncipe),” Dieciocho 39.2 (2016), 291-98.
  • “Conmemorando a Cervantes: Ventura de la Vega y la apropiación de Cervantes en el siglo XIX,” Anuario de Estudios Cervantinos 3 (2007), 133-42 . 
  • “The Theater Repression in Córdoba, 1694 -1834,” Dieciocho 18 (1995), 157-173.
  • “Two Documents for the History of the Spanish Theater in the Period of the Gobierno Intruso,” The Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 68 (1991); 211‑19.

Professional Service

Peer Reviewer for Fulbright Research,Teaching, and Teaching/Research Grants

Peer Reviews for Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Decimonónica, Modern Language Open

20+ invited book reviews, mostly for The Bulletin of Spanish Studies

Funded Grants, Awards, and Other Distinctions

  • 2019, Appointment as a Faculty Marshal (declined)
  • 2018, Modern Language Association, designated a “Lifetime Member”
  • Fulbright Senior Researcher, Spain.
  • Secured funding from ECU’s Office of International Programs to begin a pilot program that provided an honors section of Intermediate Spanish (Level IV in the initial sequence of courses) with additional days of instruction using videoconferencing with a language institute in Costa Rica.
  • Award for Excellence in Distance Learning Teaching, North Carolina Distance Learning Association.
  • Grant from East Carolina University to Improve and Extend Beginning and Intermediate Spanish DE Courses.
  • Grant from the Spanish Foreign Ministry, for three months of research in Madrid on provincial theater in mid-nineteenth century in Spain.
  • Travel grant for summer research in Spain in Madrid’s Hemeroteca Municipal, Southern Region Education Board.
  • Post-doctoral research fellowship for an academic year of archival research on nineteenth century theater, U.S. ­Spanish Joint Committee for Cultural and Educational Cooperation under the auspices of the Agreement on Friendship, Defense and Cooperation between the United States of America and the Kingdom of Spain, (Administered by the Fulbright Commission in Madrid).