In April, Steven Hutchinson, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, was inducted into Sigma Delta Pi’s Order of Don Quijote. The Order is the National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society’s highest honor, conferred annually upon only two or three people around the world.
Past inductees include renowned literary figures such as Carlos Fuentes, Carmen Laforet, Fernando Arrabal and Camilo José Cela, among other highly accomplished literary artists and scholars. A complete list of past honorees is available here.
Professor Hutchinson received his degrees in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago and is a specialist in early modern Spanish literature. His first book, Cervantine Journeys (1992), investigates the relations between writing and travel, while his second book, Economía Ética en Cervantes (2001), proposes a rethinking of ethics in literary studies.
He has also written some fifty articles on topics including utopian thought, poetics, rhetoric, emotion, eroticism, geography, race, cultural and religious otherness; the Spanish writers studied include Antonio de Guevara, Melchor de la Serna, Jerónimo de Pasamonte, Jaime Bleda, Cervantes, Góngora, Quevedo, María de Zayas, Alonso de Contreras, Antonio Machado and Cernuda, among others. He is currently concluding a book project entitled Writing the Early Modern Mediterranean, and is editing the first monographic volume of the journal eHumanista/Cervantes under the rubric “Cervantes and the Mediterranean”. He is President of the Cervantes Society of America.
Sigma Delta Pi, the National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society (La Sociedad Nacional Honoraria Hispánica), was established on November 14, 1919, at the University of California Berkeley to advance undergraduate scholarship in Spanish language. The Society’s insignia is the royal seal of Fernando and Isabel, representing Castille, León and Aragón. With 610 chapters nationwide and its national office at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, Sigma Delta Pi is a member of the Association of College Honor Societies, the nation’s only certifying agency for college and university honor societies.
