UC Santa Barbara Basque Studies Symposium

The University of California, Santa Barbara will be hosting a Basque Studies Symposium Wednesday, May 14th, 2008.  This symposium is the first of what will be a series of conferences on Basque Studies this year.  UC Santa Barbara  (UCSB) has a long history of Basque Studies with an endowed chair named after Barandiaran, the famous anthropologist.   

EuskoSare spoke to symposium organizer, Viola Miglio, to better understand where the interest came from and what the symposium's goals are.  Please see EuskoSare's full  interview with Ms. Miglio.  Among other things, the she would like to rekindle interest and the formation of a complete Basque Studies program at UCSB.  Ms. Miglio also would like to point out that this years conference is not just about linguistics,  but it also has a very interesting second session on contemporary Basque literature featuring literary critics and a roundtable of contemporary women writers (Arkotxa, Landa, Meabe).  “ I wanted to awaken the interest of my  colleagues as well as the students, most of whom are linguists or literature experts.”

There will be ten experts presenting their respective topics from the United States and from the Basque Country.  Topics will include a Basque language syntactic project, language rights in the Basque Country, a look at Euskera’s agglutinative aspects and Basque words, modern literature, the diaspora, and translation challenges in the literary modern world.

Conference Program

Morning: Linguistics Session

9:00 Opening Remarks by David Marshall, Dean of the School of Letters and Sciences, UCSB
9:15 Ricardo Etxepare
Director of IKER - Basque Text and Language Study Center (CNRS), Bayona, France
Title: "Syntactic Variation in Basque: an Atlas Project"
9:55 Xabier Irujo
University of Nevada, Reno
Title: "Language Rights in the Basque Country"
10:35 - 10:45 Coffee Break
10:45 Julen Manterola Agirre
University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz
Title: “Is Basque an Agglutinative Language?”
11:25 José Ignacio Hualde
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Title: "Basque Words"
12:05-1:00 Lunch
Afternoon: Literature Session 'Minority Literatures in the Global Scene'
13:00 Mari Jose Olaziregi
University of Nevada, Reno/ University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz
Title: "Basque Literature Today"
13:30 Estibaliz Ezkerra
University of Nevada, Reno
Title: "Basque Voices from the Diaspora"

2:00-3:00 Roundtable: Literature and Translation
Basque Writers:

• Aurelia Arkotxa
• Mariasun Landa
• Miren Agur Meabe

The symposium is free and open to the public.  It will be at the McCune Conference Room on the 6th floor of the Humanities & Social Sciences Building. It will be sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program, the Comparative Literature Program, the Linguistics Department, UCSB, IKER/CNRS Basque Texts and Language Study Center from Bayona, France, in addition to the University of Nevada, Reno and Boise State University.  Please refer to links below for more information and maps.

More information

• Basque Studies Symposium

• Maps