Michael Schinasi selected Fulbright Scholar to Spain

East Carolina University foreign language professor Michael Schinasi was selected for a Fulbright award to Spain in spring 2014, for his book proposal Performance and the Theater Industry in Nineteenth Century Spain: the Teatro Español and the Creation of a National Theater.

The chapters of the book are tentatively titled: 1. Ideology, Realpolitik and the Creation of Spain’s First National Theater. 2. Six Images of the Teatro Español and its Famous Café from the End of the 18th Century to the End of the 19th. 3. The Theatre’s Operation. The Monarchy’s Takeoever of the Building. 4. The Second Period of the Teatro Español. Quarrels and Jealousies. Politicization of the Theatre and Attacks by the Madrid Press. Demise in 1851.

More than one publisher has expressed interest in the completed manuscript on this neglected pivotal moment in 1849-51 of the History of the Spanish theatre.

Schinasi was a Fulbright grantee to Spain once before, in 1987-88. He is author of an edition of the Poems of Ventura de la Vega (Grupo de Estudios del Siglo XVIII-University of Salamanca, 2005) and is at work on an edition of his prototypical bourgeois comedy, El hombre del mundo (1845).

His work on Vega complements his proposal for the Fulbright: a detailed history of the national theatre and a textual edition of one of the most popular contemporary plays. Vega was a principal architect of the theater reforms of 1849 that created the Teatro Español, and was the national theater’s first director. Schinasi hopes to have an extended period in Madrid for use of the resources there, particularly the National Historic Archive, the National Library, and the Archive of the Comunidad de Madrid.

— Courtesy of ECU Foreign Languages and Literatures blog