Speakers

CARLOS REIS is a retired full professor at the University of Coimbra, where he received his doctorate in 1983, with a thesis on Portuguese neorealism. The author of more than thirty books (the most recent being Dicionário de Estudos Narrativos, 2018), with several published internationally, in Spain, Italy, Germany, France and Brazil, he has taught as a visiting professor at universities in Spain, the United States and Brazil. Part of his research has been devoted to Eça de Queirós (roughly a dozen books published), and he served as coordinator of the respective Critical Edition (20 volumes; Imprensa Nacional). He also coordinated the Critical History of Portuguese Literature (9 volumes; Editorial Verbo).

At the Faculdade de Letras de Coimbra he taught Portuguese Literature, Theory of Literature, Queirosian Studies and Media Narrative Studies. He was scientific coordinator of the Center for Portuguese Literature (2012-2023), a research unit in which he directs two projects: “Critical Edition of the Works of Eça de Queirós” and “Figures of Fiction”; under the latter, he launched and directs the Dictionary of Characters of Portuguese Fiction (http://dp.uc.pt/).

He was director of the National Library (1998-2002), rector of Universidade Aberta (2006-2011), president of the International Association of Lusitanistas (1999-2000) and of the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (2010-2011). He has been awarded the Jacinto do Prado Coelho (1996), Eduardo Lourenço (2019) and Vergílio Ferreira (2020) prizes. He is doctor honoris causa by the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, commander of Isabel la Católica (Spain) and of Sant’Iago da Espada (Portugal), corresponding member of the Real Academia Española and of the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa. In 2000 he was commissioner for the Centennial of the Death of Eça de Queirós (Ministry of Culture) and in 2022 he was commissioner for the Centennial of José Saramago (José Saramago Foundation). He is a member of the cultural council of the Eça de Queirós Foundation.

Darío Villanueva has a degree in Romance Philology from the University of Santiago de Compostela and a PhD in Hispanic Philology from the Autonomous University of Madrid. He is a professor of Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela, of whose Faculty of Philology he was Director between 1987 and 1990 and Rector of the same University between 1994 and 2002. Since October 2020 he is Emeritus Professor at USC. He is a correspondent of the Argentine Academy of Letters, appointed in 2002; from the National Academy of Letters of Uruguay, appointed in 2015; from the Cuban Academy of Language, appointed in 2016; from the Honduran Academy of Language, appointed in 2018; of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language, appointed in 2018, and of the Equatorial Guinean Academy of the Spanish Language, appointed in 2019. He has been an honorary academic of the Colombian Academy of the Language since 2018. And corresponding academician of the Accademia della Crusca de Florencia, appointed in 2016. In addition, he is an honorary doctor from fourteen universities in Argentina, China, the United States, Peru, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Spain and Honduras. And honorary professor at two universities in the Dominican Republic and Argentina .

He has been elected RAE académico numerario since July 5, 2007. He entered on June 8, 2008 with the speech entitled “Don Quixote” before the cinema.

Director of the RAE institution from January 8, 2015 to January 10, 2019. He was in charge of the RAE secretariat from January 2010 to January 2015.

He was an nato member of the Spanish Council of State between 2015 and 2019.