Aranzazu Ascunce Arenas

Assistant Professor

Moore Hall 487
1890 East-West Rd.
Honolulu, HI 96822

Phone: (808) 956-4177
Fax: (808) 956- 9536
E-mail: aranzazu@hawaii.edu

Professor Ascunce believes that the freedom to create, perform, and be exposed to art is a basic human right. She exposes her students to literature and other works of art that challenge traditional ways of thinking. She enjoys teaching students how literary or visual masterpieces are, and have been, capable of transforming an individual, and entire societies. Her first published book explains how one artistic movement in particular, the Avant-Garde, connected two antagonistic capital cities: Barcelona and Madrid in unprecedented ways during the first three decades of twentieth-century in Spain – a time of political instability, world war, dictatorship, economic hardship, and critical identity reformation immediately following the fall of the Spanish Empire. Professor Ascunce is currently working on a new manuscript on the topic of inner exile. She is exploring works of art that treat subjects who are trapped – figuratively, literally or both – and have no way out of their current state of captivity but from within their own mind and soul. Specifically, she is examining multiple dramatic texts written by women playwrights from Spain, a corpus of paintings by one contemporary Cuban artist, and several Spanish films. Professor Ascunce holds a B.A. in English and Spanish from Duke University and earned her Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Virginia.  Since she defended her dissertation in 2007, she has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii.

Book

Barcelona and Madrid: Social Networks of the Avant-Garde (Bucknell University Press, 2012)

Teaching Experience in Spanish

From Page to Stage: Reading and Performance of Spanish Theatrical Texts

Hispanic Poetry: From the Medieval to the Modern ‘Romance’

Masterworks of Spanish Literature: Spain 1800 – 2000

Generation of 98: Spain’s Post-Colonial Identity Crisis

Women of the Spanish Stage: From Romanticism to Modernism

Advanced Composition and Conversation

Intermediate Spanish

Teaching Experience in English

From Picasso to Dalí and Everything in Between

Spanish Literature in Translation: Women Playwrights in Democratic Spain

Studies in Culture: Spain and Portugal

Advanced English

Upper-Intermediate English

English for Special Purposes

Teaching Experience Abroad

University of Sevilla, Spain

University of Valencia, Spain