Estelle Irizarry

Biography

Estelle Irizarry, Ph.D., is emerita professor of Hispanic Literature at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. and author of 40 books and more than 150 articles in international journals.

She has written books about individual Spanish authors Francisco Ayala, Rafael Dieste, Odón Betanzos Palacios and E. Fernandez Granell, as well as thematic subjects: literary hoaxes in La broma literaria en nuestros dias (1979) and writer-painters in Escritores-pintores espñnoles del siglo XX (1991).

A specialist in literary computing, she showed what it could accomplish in Hispanic examples, in Informática y literatura (1997, jointly published by Proyecto/A Ediciones and the University of Puerto Rico. Another such contribution was her annotated edition under a grant from the 5th Centennial Commission of the Discovery of America and Puerto Rico, of the first novel published in the New World, Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez, resolving the authorship question with computer analysis, showing that the Puerto Rican protagonist Ramírez was co-author.

In Puerto Rican literature, she has published seven titles on Enrique A. Laguerre, in addition to the introduction to the centenary compilation by Ricardo Alegría of Laguerre's complete novels in four volumes. Other titles are Estudios sobre Enrique A. Laguerre (Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 2005), a critical edition of Seva by Luis López Nieves (Cara y Cruz, Grupo Editorial Norma, 2006), El arte de la tergiversación en Luis Lopez Nieves (Terranova), and in Ediciones Puerto, three books about José Elías Levis: La voz que rompió el silencio: la novelística singular de J. Elías Levis en Puerto Rico post-1898, and critical editions of Vida nueva and of El estercolero in two versions.

In 2009, she presented in Madrid her book El ADN de los escritos de Cristóbal Colón (Ediciones Puerto), which became an immediate best-seller. While the second edition was in press, she translated it into English as Christopher Columbus: The DNA of his Writings (2010). They were innovative in bringing objective evidence based on replicable scientific approaches and methodology to mysteries surrounding the identity of Columbus.

In 1995 she was elected full member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language and corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy. She holds the Spanish Cross of the Civil Order of Alfonso X the Wise and honorary membership in the Hispanic Society of America. From 1993 a 2000 she was Editor-in-Chief of Hispania, the official journal of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, where she instituted an all electronic submissions, received a prize from the Editors of Learned Journals, and made Hispania the first digitized journal in the humanities thanks to the help of AATSP volunteers.

Dr. Irizarry received the Grand National Prize of the International Book Fair in Puerto Rico in 2010. Her latest works are an updated edition of Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez, a new nonfiction --La carta de amor de Cristóbal Colón a la Reina Isabel and its translation into English as Christopher Columbus's Love Letter to Queen Isabel-- and a series of study guides keyed to Infortunios and Levis's novels.