ACADEMIC AREAS: Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies, Sephardic Languages, Ladino, Poetry, French and Francophone Literatures, Latin American Studies
Ph.D., University of California - Berkeley, 2003 M.A., Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1993 B.A., Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1988
Professor Balbuena was a Starr Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University before joining the Clark Honors College in 2004. In addition to her teaching in the honors college, she is a participating faculty in the Comparative Literature and Romance Languages departments. Professor Balbuena is also active with the Jewish Studies program, where she sits on the executive committee; the Latin American Studies program, for which she served as interim director in 2014-15; and the Women and Gender Studies program. She is a member of the Center for the Study of Women in Society's Women of Color Project, sits on the executive board for the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, is chair of the Curriculum Committee in the University Senate, and is extremely active with the university's Global Studies Institute, where she participates in working groups on Brazil, Israel, and translation.
Outside of the university, Balbuena sits on the editorial boards of The Journal of Jewish Identities, The Levantine Review, and The Journal for the Study of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry. She is editor of modern literature for The Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World. Balbuena is fluent in Portuguese, English, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Ladino and Italian, and has functional knowledge in Arabic, Catalan, Galician, and Yiddish.
Research Interests & Current Projects
Monique Balbuena is a translator and a scholar of comparative literature and Jewish studies. Her research interests concern the relationship between language and identity, specifically how multilingual writers construct their identity through their choice of languages and intertexts. She has focused on literatures from North Africa's Maghreb and Latin America, and also given special attention to literatures by Sephardic Jews - roughly defined as those whose origins are in the Iberian Peninsula of Spain - especially works written in Ladino, the Sephardic language. She is among a handful of scholars examining the production of contemporary literature, particularly poetry, in Ladino. Balbuena analyzes Ladino not only within the landscape of Jewish literature, but also within the context of how literature written in minor languages informs our reading of canonical works.
Professor Balbuena is currently working on two book projects: Sephardic Literary Responses to the Holocaust, and Ladino Today: Cultural Representation, Language Revival and National Identity.
Awards & Fellowships
2014: Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar on Holocaust Literature, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies
2012: Mellon Collaborative Summer Fellowship
2008: National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute
2008: University of Oregon Faculty Summer Research Award
2006: Faculty Research Fellowship, Oregon Humanities Center, University of Oregon
2005: New Faculty Summer Research Award, University of Oregon
2003: Harry Starr Fellowship in Judaica, Harvard University - Center for Jewish Studies
2003: Newhouse Foundation Fellowship, University of California - Berkeley, Jewish Studies Program
2003: American Sephardi Federation, Broome and Allen Scholarship
Grants
2012: Publication Grant from the Lucius L. Littauer Foundation
2010: Grant from the Frankel Institute on Jewish Languages at the University of Michigan
2006: Curland Grant for Language and Gender Studies, Center for the Study of Women in Society & Yamada Language Center, University of Oregon
2006: Research Grant, Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon
2004: Koret Foundation Publishing Grant
2003: Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, Doctoral Scholarship Grant
2012, "Jewish Latin American Identity and Cultural Production" (edited by Monique Balbuena and Adriana Brodsky), Special Issue, Journal of Jewish Identities, 5:1.
2014, "When the Eye Meets the World: Reading Subjectivity in Two Poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade," Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies, n.26: 127-141.
2012, "Judeo-Spanish Texts in Latin American Genres: Language Revival and National Identity in Contemporary Argentina," Selected Papers from the Fifteenth British Conference on Judeo-Spanish Studies (edited by Hilary Pomeroy, Christopher J. Pountain and Elena Romero), Queen Mary University of London.
