News & Events Spanish Professor Ilan Stavans To Ask “Who Owns the English Language?” at Amherst College March 29

March 3, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Ilan Stavans, the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Latin American and Latino Culture and Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor at Amherst College, will deliver the inaugural 2006 Jackie M. Pritzen Lecture, to celebrate 40 years of the Five College consortium, at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 29 in the Cole Assembly Room (Red Room) in Converse Hall at Amherst College. His talk, titled “Who Owns the English Language?” and sponsored by Five Colleges, Inc., is free and open to the public.

A member of the Amherst faculty since 1993, Stavans is also author of Growing up Latino (1993), The Hispanic Condition (1995), The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (1998), On Borrowed Words (2001), The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (2003) and most recently Dictionary Days (2005.) Stavans has published the first dictionary of Spanglish, titled Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language (2003), and has debated in public the role language plays in public life and civic affairs for African Americans, Latinos and other immigrant groups. Editor of the new Encyclopedia Latina, Stavans also published a selection of the interviews that he conducted on Conversations with Ilan Stavans on the WGBH (PBS) program La Plaza. He is the editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Latino Literature.

Austin Sarat, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought and Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor at Amherst College, will give the second 2006 Jackie M. Pritzen Lecture on Wednesday, May 3.

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