Remembering Professor Emerita, Graciela Palau de Nemes

The SLLC community mourns the passing of Dr. Graciela Palau de Nemes. A long-time faculty member in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Professor Emeritus

The SLLC community mourns the passing of Dr. Graciela Palau de Nemes. A long-time faculty member in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Professor Emeritus. Dr. Graciela Nemes has been recognized first and foremost as one of the most prominent critics of the works of the 1956 Nobel laureate and Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez whose Nobel nomination she documented and put forward supported by the, then named, Foreign Languages Department at Maryland. She has also arduously translated and edited a three-volume memoir and letters belonging to Zenobia Camprubí, Jiménez’s wife. Due to more than one hundred articles, her academic contributions to the criticism of poetry and poetics, modernismo, and literature in general have been recognized both nationally and internationally. Dr. Nemes’ legacy as a pioneer Latin Americanist is equally important. She arrived at Maryland as a graduate student and Spanish language instructor as early as 1946 and taught her last class in 2001. She served as a bridge figure between Spanish and Latin American literatures and cultures and her dedication fostered the emergence of specific and enduring research agendas that helped shape the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She belongs to a visionary generation that promoted, advanced, and embodied the early transformation of our fields of study. As a pioneer of and guiding force for the teaching of Spanish language and literature at the University of Maryland, Dr. Nemes is a symbol of the extraordinary contributions of immigrants to our society and the relevance of Latin American women to the intellectual development of the Humanities. Graciela Nemes is a graduate alumna and beloved professor at UMD. We celebrate her story, which is an integral part of the history of this University.