Viorica Patea Birk
Datos / Personal Information
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Docencia / Teaching Assignments
Primer semestre
- Literatura Inglesa: Romanticismo y Época Victoriana - 102519 (Grado en Estudios Ingleses)
- American Poetry and Poetics (Master-PhD MAES)
Segundo semestre
Investigación / Research
Viorica Patea is Full Professor of American Literature at the University of Salamanca (Spain) where she teaches twentieth-century American poetry and nineteenth-century English literature. She was born in Bucharest and studied at 'Liceul 21', a Gymnasium for the German speaking population living in Romania whose mother tongue was German. She defected from Romania in 1977 and eventually, by some felicitous accidents of fate, Spain has become her home country. She was educated at Bucharest University, Bonn University, and the University of Virginia studying English and Spanish Philology. She received her degree in English Philology in 1982 at the University of Salamanca where she also earned her PhD in 1987. Her main fields of interest are: American Romanticism, Modernism, 20th century American poetry, utopian literature, literature of testimony, and East-European literature. She has been a recipient of several grants of the Spanish Ministry of Culture and the Fulbright Commission. Over the years she has been Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Boston (1984-1985), Visiting Exchange Professor at the University of New Orleans (1992) where she taught several courses in American Literature, and Visiting Research Scholar at Harvard (1995-1996) doing research on the poetry of T. S. Eliot and returning to this University in subsequent summers. She has also conducted research in other US Universities such as Duke, Tulane and the University of Texas at Austin. At Smith College and Indiana University she studied the Sylvia Plath archives.
Viorica Patea specializes in English Romanticism and nineteenth-century and twentieth-century American literature, with particular interests in poetry, modernism, the fantastic, and the relationship between poetry and visual arts. She is the author of various articles on Emily Dickinson, R. W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath and George Orwell.
Viorica Patea’s published books include among others Entre el mito y la realidad: Aproximación a la obra poética de Sylvia Plath (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1989), and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land [La tierra baldía. (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2005]. [link] She is also the editor of several collections of essays, such as Critical Essays on the Myth of the American Adam (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2001) [link], and, in collaboration with Paul Derrick, Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007) [link].
Her most recent publication is a collection of essays, Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective (Rodopi 2012) which received the Javier Coy Research Award for the best edited book (2013) from the Spanish Association of American Studies. http://www.brill.com/products/book/short-story-theories
She has contributed to the volume La Historia de la Poesía Norteamericana with an essay on American Postwar Poetry. Recently, she has studied the poetry of Patrizia de Rachewiltz, Pound’s granddaughter, whose poems My Taishan (Linteo 2014) she has translated into Spanish.
Some of her studies are chapters in books such as Semantics of Silences in Linguistic and Literature (eds. Gudrun Grabher and Ulrike Jessner. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1996) [link], American Poetry. Whitman to the Present (ed. Robert Rehder and Patrick Vincent, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2006) [link], and forthcoming The Visual Culture of Modernism (Deborah Madsen and Mario Klarer, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2011), T. S. Eliot, Dante and the Idea of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011).
Her other interests include studies in testimonial literature with a special focus on East European countries. A personal and literary interest in Romanian literature led her to study Romanian twentieth-century literature, focusing on the poetry of Ana Blandiana and the memoir-journal of Nicolae Steinhardt. Together with Fernando Sánchez Miret she has translated from Romanian into Spanish El diario de la felicidad by Nicolae Steinhardt (Salamanca: Sígueme 2007). [link] and Proyectos de Pasado by Ana Blandiana (Cáceres: Periférica, 2008) [link] She has occasionally contributed articles and interviews to newspapers, magazines and other media sources on a variety of political and cultural issues both in Spain (El País, El Mundo) and Romania (Revista 22, Romania Literara, Orizont).
Yet the book she is most proud of is her translation in collaboration with Paul Scott Derrick of Ana Blandiana’s poems My Native Land A4, to appear at Bloodaxe (UK). Some of Blandiana’s poems were published in journals such as The Cincinnati Review, Interlit, Poetry London, Notre Dame Review, and Modern Poetry in Translation, The Literary Review. .
She has directed and participated in various research projects on American Literature, focusing on poetry, the avant-garde and the relationship between poetry, the image and visual arts. Funds were provided by the Consejería de Educación de la Junta de Castilla y León and the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación I+D+I.
She is a member of different teaching and research committees of the degree in English Philology (Comisión de Docencia, Comisión de Garantía y Calidad del Grado) and the Master-PhD in Advanced English Studies: Languages and Cultures in Contact.
Viorica Patea reads and writes in five languages, Romanian, Spanish, English, French and German, yet she seems to communicate best in the intuitive and emotional language of animals. She is very passionate about dogs, especially Samoyeds (Siberian sledge dogs who participated in the South Pole expeditions, and the favourite dog of Constantin Brancusi [link]). Some years ago she took up horse riding and despite occasional accidents she perseveres in roaming through the beautiful mountains of the Sierra de Béjar.
Her office is in Placentinos 18, 2nd floor. She can be reached by phone 0034-923294500 (extension 1757), by fax 0034-92329456, and preferably by email at Esta dirección electrónica esta protegida contra spam bots. Necesita activar JavaScript para visualizarla
See also: http://americanpoetry.usal.es/