2019 Catherine and Charles Freeburg University Professorships

Fernando Burgos, World Languages and Literatures

Fernando Burgos Pérez is a Professor of Spanish at the University of Memphis, where he coordinates the graduate program of the Department of World Languages and Literatures. He completed his BA at the Universidad de Chile with the degree Profesor de Español and received his Ph.D. in Romance Languages from the University of Florida where he was awarded a Recognition for Outstanding Contribution. Before coming to the University of Memphis, he taught intensive language courses for two summers at Middlebury College in Vermont. He also taught literature for four years at the University of Chile-Osorno as an assistant professor. His area of research includes twentieth and twentieth-first century Latin American narrative, and he has delivered more than ninety papers at international and national conferences. In his more than eighty articles and fourteen books, Professor Burgos Pérez has discussed the fundamental tenets of both modernity and postmodernity in Latin American literature, in particular the transformational power of art, the marginalization of the intellectual, the frightening networks of History along with the distrust towards the idea of progress detached from ethical principles as a fallacy that has maintained societies in a constant state of deception.

More recently, Professor Burgos-Perez's research focuses upon the works of the Argentinian writer Luisa Valenzuela and the Panamanian writer Cheri Lewis, analyzing the ways in which cultural discourses are shaped by social power games and ideological dogmas of the various time periods. His study of Valenzuela's rewriting of the traditional fairy tales—such as the ones by Charles Perrault in the seventeenth century and the Grimms Brothers along with Hans Christian Andersen in the nineteenth century—uncovers the political dimension underlying all cultural products. In discussing Lewis' work, his research is concerned with the art's strategies for criticizing the various control systems throughout history which have attempted to define and catalogue a phenomenon as fluid, hybrid, plural and heterogeneous as male/female eroticism.

His book Una temporada en la posmodernidad latinoamericana (A Season in Latin-American Postmodernity, published in 2017 is an essay devoted to scrutinizing the various postmodern scenarios in the work of well-known Latin American authors by exploring themes such as the connections between the fantastic and the absurd, the use of artistic distortion as a criticism of human arrogance, and the recurrence of the apocalyptic.

Kathy Lou Schultz, English

Kathy Lou Schultz is Assoc. Professor of English and Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program. Previously, Dr. Schultz was the Director of the English Honors Program. She is the author of The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka (Palgrave 2013; paperback 2016) and a forthcoming monograph on poet Claudia Rankine, as well as four collections of poems, recently Biting Midge: Works in Prose (Belladona) and Some Vague Wife (Atelos Press). Schultz's articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals including Contemporary Literature, Jacket2, Journal of Modern Literature, Plume Poetry and anthologies including Efforts and Affections: Women Poets on Mentorship (University of Iowa Press), the Companion to Modernist Poetry (Wiley-Blackwell), From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice (ON Contemporary Practice), and the forthcoming Some Other Blues: New Scholarship on Amiri Baraka (Ohio State University Press). Her poems are published in Bombay Gin, Cleaver Magazine, Fence Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Hambone, Miracle Monocle, Mirage #4/Period(ical), New American Writing, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and other journals. She has appeared twice as an invited speaker on the podcast, POEMTALK, a collaboration of the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, and the Poetry Foundation.

Dr. Schultz has been invited to lecture and read her poetry at universities and arts venues throughout the U.S. and internationally, including the University of Fribourg (Switzerland); the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Santa Cruz; Pennsylvania State University; the National Poetry Foundation at the University of Maine; the Graduate Center of the City of New York; the Kelly Writers House (University of Pennsylvania); New Langston Arts (San Francisco); the San Francisco International Book Festival; and The Poetry Project (New York City). She has also collaborated and performed poetry with musicians in Philadelphia, New York, and Memphis, and on the CD, The Colored Waiting Room, by Dr. Guy's Musiqology.

Dr. Schultz was an invited faculty member for the "Don't Deny My Voice: Black Poetry After the Black Arts Movement" Institute, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Project on the History of Black Writing at the University of Kansas. She also serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Langston Hughes Review. Of her extensive service, Schultz is particularly proud of her work on the Faculty Senate Committee on Paid Parental Leave and the successes of her student mentees who have won top prizes including the Best Thesis Award, the Graduate African American Literature Concentration Award, the Graduate Literature Concentration Award, first prize in the Riley Essay Contest, CAS travel grants, and the Wynn Fellowship. Poetry also takes Schultz into the community as judge for the MidSouth Grand Poetry Slam held at Frederick Douglass High School in Memphis and as a mentor for young poets.

As Freeburg University Professor, Schultz will complete research for her third monograph: Black Dada, Afro-Surrealism: Avant Gardes of the African Diaspora.