In the decade or so preceding that luncheon, Remedi, Harrington, and Lambright had worked steadily to transform the way they presented the knowledge of their specialty area to students. The change revolved around broadening the limits of the “field of culture” from which both they and their students derived their objects of study. Before this, Spanish at places like Trinity was, as Harrington jokes, “learn your grammar in the hopes of someday reading a bit of Cervantes.”
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| Their idea was to help students gain a broad-based cultural literacy that would allow them to navigate within the contemporary Spanish-speaking world with historically informed sophistication and sensitivity. It was an approach that dovetailed nicely with Trinity’s recent opening to the city of Hartford and other great cities around the world. That day they realized, however, that they were not exploiting what was arguably their greatest asset, the mostly Spanish-speaking city of Hartford. |
In effecting these changes, Harrington, Lambright, and their colleague, Professor Gustavo Remedi, drew upon the strikingly different perspectives from which they each approached Hispanic studies, an area of scholarship almost as vast as the Hispanic diaspora. In a sense, their personal diversity mirrored that of the community they now sought to study and explain to their students.
Teaching in the city’s cultural cross-currents
After earning her B.A. at Southern Methodist University, where she majored in Spanish, history, and Latin American studies, Lambright received a Fulbright Grant to study in Ecuador, an experience she calls “a life-transforming opportunity,” out of which grew her interest in Andean culture. Her graduate work, at the University of Texas, expanded upon that interest. An expert on Latin American literature, film, theater, and other forms of cultural production, and a former professional dancer, she is interested in “the relationship of the intellectual/artist with the nation and the production of national discourse.”
A former architect, Remedi completed all of his degrees at the University of Minnesota, where he focused on Hispanic and Luso- Brazilian literature and culture. At Trinity, he has taught subjects as diverse as Latin American poetry, theater, and short fiction; the literature of conquest and colonization; testimonial literature and human rights in Latin America; and semiotics, the study of signs and symbols and their significance in communication.
Harrington, who earned his B.A. at Holy Cross, his M.A. at Middlebury, and his Ph.D. at Brown, was first captivated by the history of Eastern Europe, especially the complex matrix of national and ethnic groups living on the borderlands between Poland and Russia. Discovering the dynamic realities of post-dictatorship Spain and Portugal after college, his focus changed to analyzing the ways in which the various national and sub-national groupings of the Iberian Peninsula had interacted with one another over time, an interest that has led him, in turn, to the study of migrations between the “peripheral nations” of Spain (Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque Country) and places such as Argentina, Uruguay, Cuba, and the United States. Harrington is a co-founder and codirector of Trinity’s Global Learning Site in Barcelona.
Assessing these individual strengths, the three realized that at a leading liberal arts college embracing innovative urban and international studies themes, Hispanic studies should reflect the cross-currents where those disparate scholarly landscapes intersected. “Hispanic Hartford” was a product of that decision.
