The writer and linguist will occupy the seat vacated by Margarita Salas. The writer and linguist Paloma Díaz-Mas (Madrid, 1954) will occupy the small i seat of the RAE left vacant by the death of Margarita Salas, on November 7, 2019.

Díaz-Mas has prevailed over the linguist Dolores Corbella, the other candidate nominated by the academics from RAE. When she takes office, she will be the twelfth woman with a seat in the entire history of the Academy and the eighth in active service.

The new academic is part of the two great professional families of the RAE: that of literature and that of linguistics. On the one hand, Díaz-Mas has an extensive career as a university researcher. She studied Romance Philology and Journalism at the Complutense University of Madrid and received a PhD in 1981 with a thesis on Sephardic tragic poetry directed by the academic Manuel Alvar López. Later, she did research and taught at the CSIC and at the Universidad del País Vasco (University of the Basque Country), where she became a professor. Medieval Castilian literature, the Judeo-Spanish cultural tradition and the link between the Sephardic communities and Spain during the 19th century, have been her main fields of study.

Read more: El Mundo