Filming the Birth of the Spanish Language
Listen in to part two of a conversation with Dr. Ryan Szpiech, associate professor of Spanish and director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan, about parallel histories, the world of medieval Spain, and the creation of a documentary on the beginning of the Spanish language.
Experience the Episode
Presented by Medieval Institute
Listen in to part two of a conversation with Dr. Ryan Szpiech, associate professor of Spanish and director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan, about parallel histories, the world of medieval Spain, and the creation of a documentary on the beginning of the Spanish language.
Meeting in the Middle Ages is hosted by Will Beattie and Ben Pykare, both Ph.D. candidates at Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute. The podcast is sponsored by the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame and supported by the Medieval Academy of America’s Graduate Student Committee through their Community Building Award.
MoreMeet the Speaker: Dr. Ryan Szpiech
Dr. Ryan Szpiech is an Associate Professor of Spanish in the Departments of Romance Languages and Literatures, Middle East Studies, and Judaic Studies, and an affiliate of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.
He studies the cultures and literatures of medieval Iberia, focusing especially on cultural interaction, exchange, and conflict. His interests converge around polemical writing (religious disputations and conflicts) and translation (of languages, alphabets, styles, beliefs, identities, and ideas) as elements defining the relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
He has focused much of my research on the fourteenth-century convert Abner of Burgos (known as Alfonso of Valladolid after conversion), and written a book on narratives of religious conversion and their function within polemical writing in the 12th to the 15th centuries. He has also edited a book of essays on exegesis and co-edited two other collected volumes related to my former role as editor of the journal Medieval Encounters (which was edited from 2013–2022).
The Birth of Spanish in 3D: A Search for Its Origins