The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures congratulates Professor of Spanish Akiko Tsuchiya, the recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend for her project, “Spanish Women of Letters in the Nineteenth-century Antislavery Movement: Transnational Networks and Exchanges.” Her work examines the role that nineteenth-century Spanish women writers, reformers, and activists played in the transnational antislavery movement, through the cultivation of social and cultural networks that allowed them to assert their presence and agency in a public sphere dominated by men. Tsuchiya’s work elucidates the different ways in which these women engaged, negotiated and, at times, contested existing gender and racial paradigms as they participated in the antislavery debate, both within and outside of Spain’s national borders. Her research took her to Barcelona, Spain this summer, where she was Visiting Scholar at the ADHUC: Research Center for Theory, Gender, Sexuality at the University of Barcelona. She conducted archival research at the Biblioteca Pública Arús (pictured below) to investigate the influence of Freemasonry on Catalan women who embraced the antislavery cause.
