The University of Edinburgh inaugurates this Wednesday its first Cervantes Chair

2023-05-23 09:55:52

The teaching of Spanish in Scotland in recent years has had a sustained growth, a fact highlighted by a report from the British Council that showed the consolidation of the Spanish language as the foreign language most in demand by secondary students throughout the United Kingdom. .

Spanish is currently taught in almost half of primary schools and two-thirds of secondary schools offer it.

As reported by Cervantes in a note, the chair, which will depend on the Cervantes Institute in Manchester, will be inaugurated at the university with the presence of the director of the Institute, Luis García Montero.

He will be accompanied by the Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, Peter Mathieson; the Academic Director of the Cervantes Institute, Carmen Pastor; the Consul General of Spain in Edinburgh, Ignacio Cartagena; and the new professor Cervantes.

The inauguration of the chair will be joined, the day before, by a recital at the Poetry Library, in which the poet and translator Anna Crowe, Alexis Grohmann and Ignacio Cartagena will participate, along with Luis García Montero.

On Wednesday, at the consulate, the director of Cervantes will meet with the professor of Hispanic Linguistics and coordinator of the online teaching programs of the Department of European Languages ​​and Cultures of the University of Edinburgh, Carlos Soler.

For the development of its activity, the Cervantes Chair will have the support of the Department of Spanish, University of Edinburgh (1583), with the figure of Professor Cervantes, a professor at the university itself; and with the transfer of the necessary spaces for carrying out teacher training courses and cultural programs.

Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature at the School of Literatures, Grohmann is also director of the Arturo Pérez-Reverte Chair at the University of Murcia and foreign corresponding academic of the Royal Spanish Academy.

Author of a hundred publications, among his works stands out the investigation about the authors Javier Marías and Arturo Pérez-Reverte, about whom he has published two essays.