Meriam Pacheco Salazar
When I was about five years old I would reach for my father’s typewriter, punch as many buttons as I could, roll out the paper, and run to him asking if, by any luck, I had been able to put together a word. I like to think this was the start of my affinity for reading and writing. Twenty years later, I am majoring in Spanish and Latin American Literature and minoring in Women and Gender Studies. I recently conducted research examining how the illustrations Asleep, Don Quixote fights the wineskins and Don Quixote reading, by French artists Charles Coypel and Gustave Doré, respectively, have been vital in the process of humanizing Don Quijote. I argued that despite using different approaches, Coypel highlighting the comical aspect and Doré emphasizing the sentimental aspect, both illustrators have provided a visual point of entry into the quixotic world which allows us to interpret Don Quijote’s reality from his own perspective, and therefore see him as human instead of a mad knight.
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I wish to explore the ways in which Cervantes is able to bring forth characters with such agency at a time when women were oppressed in numerous ways, as well as the role that being motherless may have played in the development of their characters. I will be working on this project over my senior year, and the research will be presented at the annual City University of New York Pipeline Conference in spring 2016. My research interests lead me to seek a doctoral degree in Hispanic Literatures with a focus on Women’s Literature. I wish to study women writers from the 19th and 20th century, particularly in relation to the ways gender identity shapes their experiences of motherhood, marriage/divorce, orphanhood and loss in a patriarchal