Global Humanities Junior Research and Teaching Stay at l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

(February – June, 2016)

Latin American Rewriting of European National Epics

Diana Gomes Ascenso’s current research project focuses on how the epic tradition of the Iberian Peninsula has been received in Latin America. It investigates the influence of significant works like the Cantar de mio Cid or the Lusíadas on the literary traditions of Latin America, where their reception is in fact conditioned by the shared language but – in contrast to Spain and Portugal – not by ideological attributions of a national consciousness.

Diana Gomes Ascenso studied Romance Philology and Comparative Literature at the Universities of Tübingen, Montpellier, Coimbra and Mainz. She has been a PhD Fellow within the doctoral program Portuguese Literature and Culture at Freie Universität Berlin. Her dissertation investigates the complex and sometimes hidden or codified references to empirical reality in the Portuguese poetry of the 20th century by recourse to the poetic work of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1919–2004).