Spanish professor wins award for book on the cultural uses of garbage
Matie Zubiaurre, professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the UCLA College. (Photo Courtesy of Matie Zubiaurre)
Maite Zubiaurre, professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the UCLA College, has been awarded the 2020 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for her book “Talking Trash. Cultural Uses of Waste.” The award recognizes the best book in the area of art and medicine.
In “Talking Trash,” Zubiaurre looks at refuse in its early stages, when it is still litter that can be found on city streets. She also focuses on a significant non-urban scene: the desert landscape and the clothing and other items that immigrants discard as they make their journey across the border.
Zubiaurre’s other books include “El espacio en la novela realista. Paisajes, miniaturas, perspectivas,” a book-length study of the dialectics of space and gender in European and Latin American realist fiction, and of “Cultures of the Erotic. Spain 1898-1939”, the first scholarly monograph that analyzes the diverse visual and textual representations of the erotic in Spanish popular culture during the so-called Silver Age between 1898 and 1936.
Some of Zubiaurre’s areas of expertise include comparative literature, gender studies, urban studies, cultural studies, European and Latin American Realism and Latina and Chicana fiction. She is also the author of numerous articles and critical editions and co-editor of an anthology of Spanish feminist thought, “Antología del pensamiento feminista español: 1726-2008.”
This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.
