Noël Valis, professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, has won the Victoria Urbano Academic Achievement Award (Premio Victoria Urbano de Reconocimiento Académico), given by the International Association of Hispanic Women’s Literature and Culture (Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispánica), for her work in Hispanic women’s and gender studies.
Valis began her research in this field in the 1980s, at the time a fledgling area within Hispanic studies. She co-edited (with Carol Maier) what was to become an influential and widely cited book in Hispanism, “In the Feminine Mode: Essays on Hispanic Women Writers.” She has also rediscovered forgotten or neglected 19th-century Spanish women writers and promoted Hispanic women authors through editorial work, essays, and translation, such as Noni Benegas’s “Burning Cartography,” which won the Best Book Translation Prize from the New England Council of Latin American Studies.
