We honor the retired faculty members who have made lasting contributions to the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Their dedication to teaching, research, and service helped build the strong academic community we have today. Below you’ll find more about their work and the important role each played in shaping the Department over the years.
B.A., Instituto Superior del Profesorado, Buenos Aires
Lecturer Emerita (1965-1988)
Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison
Professor Emeritus (1974-1999)
Ph.D., New York University
Professor Emeritus (1965-2000)
Victor F. Fuentes is a specialist in 19th- and 20th-century Spanish literature, culture, and film. He is a member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language and a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy. The author of approximately 300 articles and 28 books—including critical editions and anthologies—Fuentes has been a prolific and influential figure within the UCSB academic community. He is widely recognized as one of the foremost experts on the work of Luis Buñuel, to whom he dedicated five distinguished books of significant intellectual merit.
Ph.D., Princeton University
Professor Emeritus (1983-2015)
Jorge Checa made a lasting impact at UC Santa Barbara through his distinguished scholarship and teaching. His work centers on Spanish Golden Age literature, with additional focus on Colonial and Medieval Studies. He has paid particular attention to major figures such as Baltasar Gracián, Miguel de Cervantes, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Alonso de Ercilla, and Francisco Delicado. His publications include Gracián y la imaginación arquitectónica: espacio y alegoría de la Edad Media al Barroco, Experiencia y representación en el Siglo de Oro, and the anthology Barroco esencial, along with critical editions of Calderón de la Barca’s Amar después de la muerte and Lope de Vega's El poder vencido.
Ph.D., University of Haute-Bretagne
Professor Emeritus (1989-2015)
João Camilo dos Santos specializes in Portuguese Literature, Brazilian Literature, and Comparative Literature. His research publications have chiefly focused on nineteenth and twentieth century novelists and poets, giving particular attention to literary theory and criticism, focusing on technical and stylistic aspects of narrative, poetry and drama. During his time at UC Santa Barbara, he served as the Director of the Center for Portuguese Studies and as such responsible for the publication series of the Center for Portuguese Studies and the Editor of Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies, the journal that he created in 1994.
Ph.D., New York University
Distinguished Professor Emerita (1988-2018)
Suzanne Jill Levine is widely recognized as the editor of Penguin’s paperback classics of Jorge Luis Borges. A celebrated translator, Levine has brought into English the works of major Latin American authors such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Manuel Puig, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and more recently, Silvina Ocampo for City Lights Press. Levine has received numerous honors for her contributions to literary translation, including multiple PEN awards (notably the Career Achievement Award in 1996), NEA and NEH fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Rockefeller Foundation Residency at Villa Serbelloni. Her original works include The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (1991; reissued 2009) and Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions (FSG, 2000; 2002). Among her recent translations are Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome (Dorothy Project, 2018) and Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories (Seven Stories Press, 2019).
Ph.D., University of New Mexico
Professor Emeritus (1978-2018)
Francisco A. Lomelí specializes in Latin American literature—particularly Chilean, Mexican, and Argentine—as well as Central American literature, testimonial literature, translation, and Chicano literature (with an emphasis on Southwest literary history and pre-Chicano literature). His areas of expertise also include literary theory, cultural studies, autobiography, and bibliography.
He is the author or co-author of Chicano Perspectives in Literature: A Critical and Annotated Bibliography (1976), La novelística de Carlos Droguett (1983), Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the U.S.: Art and Literature (1993), and Dictionary of Literary Biography (3 vols., 1989, 1993, 1999). He also co-edited Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland (1989), and translated Barrio on the Edge by Alejandro Morales (1998).
Lomelí has published numerous articles, chapters, and interviews with Latin American and Chicano authors (including videotaped interviews), and has edited special journal issues on Ethnic Studies, Latin American topics, and colonial literature.
Ph.D., University of Lisbon
Professor Emeritus (1984-2019)
Eduardo P. Raposo specializes in Comparative Romance Grammar, Generative Syntax, Semantics, and Spanish and Portuguese Linguistics. He is the author of Teoria da Gramática: A Faculdade da Linguagem (Editorial Caminho, Lisbon, 1992), as well as numerous influential articles. Among his key publications are: “Some Asymmetries in the Binding Theory in Romance” (The Linguistic Review, 1985), “On the Null Object in European Portuguese” (Studies in Romance Linguistics, Foris, 1986), “Clause Union, the Stratal Uniqueness Law and the Chômeur Relation” (Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 1986), “Case Theory and Infl-to-Comp: The Inflected Infinitive in European Portuguese” (Linguistic Inquiry, 1987), “Long-Distance Case Assignment” (Linguistic Inquiry, 1990), and “Two Types of Small Clauses” (Syntax and Semantics, vol. 28).
Ph.D., UC San Diego
Professor Emerita (1992-2021)
Ellen McCracken served as a professor specializing in contemporary Latin American literature, Latin American cultural studies, U.S. Latino literature, literary theory, visual and verbal semiotics, mass culture, and women’s writing. She is the author of several influential books, including From Mademoiselle to Ms.: Decoding Women’s Magazines (St. Martin’s, 1993), New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity (University of Arizona Press, 1999), and The Life and Writing of Fray Angélico Chávez: A New Mexico Renaissance Man (University of New Mexico Press, 2009). Her edited volumes include Fray Angélico Chávez: Poet, Priest, Artist (University of New Mexico Press, 2000) and Guitars and Adobes and the Uncollected Stories of Fray Angélico Chávez (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2009).