Rolena Adorno, recently designated as the Sterling Professor of Spanish, studies Colonial Spanish American literature and history and the 19th-century origins of Hispanism in the United States.
The Sterling Professorship is the highest honor bestowed on Yale faculty.
Adorno, who is the chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, is the author of “Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction,” “De Guancane a Macondo: estudios de literatura hispanoamericana,” and “The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative,” which was awarded the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize by the Modern Language Association.
Adorno’s three-volume study, “Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez” (co-authored with Patrick C. Pautz) received prizes from the American Historical Association, the Western Historical Association, and the New England Council on Latin American Studies.
Adorno is the editor of “From Oral to Written Expression: Native Andean Chronicles of the Early Colonial Period,” among numerous other publications.
She has also introduced a new edition of Irving A. Leonard’s classic “Books of the Brave,” as well as its recent reissue in Spanish, “Los Libros del Conquistador.”
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Adorno has held fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She holds an honorary professorship at La Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, and is an honorary associate of the Hispanic Society of America.
In 2009 Adorno was appointed by President Barack Obama to a five-year term on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
