Ilan Stavans

Biographic Data

ID454274
NAMEIlan Stavans
GIVEN NAMESIlan
FAMILY NAMEStavans
SIGNATURESTAVANS I
AFFILIATIONSAmherst College
ORCID0000-0003-1885-3610
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS61
TOTAL CITATIONS8
AUTHOR COUNT56
EDITOR COUNT5
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1989
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX1

  • Conversations on Dictionaries: The Universe in a Book

    Open AccessWilliam A Ross, Esther Schor et al.BOOKConversations on Dictionaries2025

    How did dictionaries come to be? When and how did they originate in a specific language? Who was involved in that origin story? How have they evolved over time? What is the tension between scholarly and commercial, and between prescriptive and descriptive, dictionaries? What is the politics behind each dictionary? And what is the connection between dictionaries and nation-building? This fascinating book has the answers. It brings together a colle…

  • Our Minds Are Porous and Forgetfulness Seeps In: A Conversation on Translation and AI with Ilan Stavans

    Susan Smith Nash, Ilan StavansARTICLEWorld Literature Today2025

  • On Aging

    Open AccessIlan StavansARTICLESociety2025Cited by: 1

  • Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America

    Ilan StavansARTICLEHispanic Research Journal2024

  • A Dialogue on Borges' Blindness: Everything Near Becomes Far

    Open AccessIlan Stavans, Max Ubelaker AndradeARTICLEAmerika2024

    Among the ironies in Jorge Luis Borges’ work is that he was an inveterate reader with a portentous memory who, around the age of fifty, could no longer read and write unassisted: blindness left books out of reach at the very moment he became the director of Argentina’s National Library. Yet he didn’t feel incapacitated by blindness, grounding an intellectual journey in the richness of his experience at the edge of sight and using it to reconsider…

  • From the “Land of the Future”: How Latin American Jews became global

    Luis Krausz, Luis S Krausz et al.ARTICLEJournal of Modern Jewish Studies2023Cited by: 1

    In this dialogue, the authors discuss what Latin America has meant to Jewish immigrants, particularly during the first half of the twentieth century, and what place Jews and Judaism occupy nowadays in this part of the world. While trying to establish some general traits, the authors focus specific historical and chronological contexts, such as late 19th. Century Argentina or Brazil in the 1940s. The importance of such contemporary issues as globa…

  • Roberto Bolaño in Context

    Bolaño Roberto, María Inés Lagos et al.BOOKRoberto Bolaño in Context2022

  • Normal Jews

    Open AccessIlan StavansARTICLELatin American Research Review2022

    This essay reviews the following works:Migrations: Poem, 1976-2020. By Gloria Gervitz. Translated from the Spanish by Mark Schafer. New York: New York Review Books, 2021. Pp. 304. $20.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781681375700.Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture. By Mariusz Kałczewiak. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2020. Pp. viii + 320. $49.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780817320393.Th…

  • Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction

    Ilan StavansBOOKJewish Literature2021

    Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction explores modern Jewish literature from 1492 to the early twenty-first century, rotating around the concept of aterritoriality to appreciate the diasporic journey Jews have embarked on across geographic and linguistic spheres to the present day. At the center are canonical figures like Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, Bruno Schulz, Anne Frank, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Ph…

  • Clean, Fix, and Grant Splendor’: The Making of Diccionario de Autoridades

    Open AccessIlan StavansARTICLEInternational Journal of…2021

    Hailed as the foundation of modern Spanish-language lexicography, the Diccionario de Autoridades was developed over a period of thirteen years. While it is a window to appreciate the impact of Enlightenment ideas in Spain, it also showcases some of the country's most entrenched phobias, both within and throughout its colonies across the Atlantic. This essay looks at its planning, structure, and publication in political, cultural, and linguistic t…

  • "Américo Castro's "Problem

    Ilan StavansARTICLEThe Jewish Quarterly Review2021

    Américo Castro's "Problem" Ilan Stavans (bio) Keywords Jorge Luis Borges, Américo Castro, Conversos, Crypto-Jews, Hispanic antisemitism, Spain "Que no me entienden!"—they don't get me. When the distinguished linguist, literary critic, and historian Américo Castro (1885–1972), by then the Emory L. Ford Professor of Spanish at Princeton University, released his seminal book The Structure of Spanish History in 1940, he argued for a thorough reconsid…

  • The Melodrama Machine

    Open AccessIlan StavansARTICLELatin American Research Review2021

    This essay reviews the following works: Reimagining Brazilian Television: Luiz Fernando Carvalho’s Contemporary Vision. By Eli Lee Carter. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. Pp. x + 286. $28.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822964988. Frontera Verde. By Jenny Ceballos, Mauricio Leiva-Cock, and Diego Ramírez-Schrempp. Netflix, 2019. 8 episodes. Foundational Films: Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil. By Maite Conde. Los Angeles: University …

  • What Remains: The Suitcases of Charles F. at Willard State Hospital

    Ilan StavansBOOKWhat Remains2020

  • Memory Is a Box Without Edges: A Conversation between Ilan Stavans and Jon Crispin

    Ilan Stavans, Jon CrispinCHAPTERWhat Remains2020

  • Laura Limonic, Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jewish in the United States

    Open AccessIlan StavansARTICLEContemporary Jewry2020

  • Is American Spanish Healthy

    Open AccessIlan StavansARTICLELatin American Research Review2020

    This essay reviews the following works: How Borges Wrote. By Daniel Balderston. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. Pp. ix + 375. $49.50 hardcover. ISBN: 9780813939643. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas. Real Academia de la Lengua Española. Madrid: Taurus, 2015. Pp. 888. $193.00. ISBN: 9788430617500. An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States. By Rosina Lozano. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018.…

  • This Way to the Ovens, Señoras y Señores: Holocaust Cartoons in Latin America

    Ilan StavansARTICLEThe Journal of Holocaust Research2019

    An exploration of the world of syndicated cartoons, comics, and other ‘humor’ illustrations that address the Holocaust and fall within the purview of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism from the last third of the twentieth century to the present throughout Latin America, with an emphasis in Argentina, Mexico, and Spain

  • The Oxford Handbook of Latino Studies

    Ilan StavansBOOKOxford Handbook of Latino Studies2018

    At the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Latino minority, America’s biggest and fastest growing, is at a crossroads. Is assimilation taking place in comparable ways to previous immigrant groups? Are the links to the countries of origin being redefined in the age of contested globalism? How are Latinos changing America and how is America changing Latinos? The Oxford Handbook of Latino Studies reflects on these questions, of…

  • The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, His Fortunes and Adversities

    Ilan Stavans, Mary Morse et al.ARTICLERenaissance and Reformation2018

    Anonymous. The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, His Fortunes and Adversities, trans. and ed. Ilan Stavans. An article from journal Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme (Volume 41, Number 2, Spring 2018, pp. 7-227), on Érudit

  • Hacia un multicentrismo

    Ilan StavansARTICLEHispania2018

    Hacia un multicentrismo Ilan Stavans Palabras clave multicentrism/multicentrismo, Spanglish/espanglish, varieties of Spanish/variedades del español, World Englishes/ingleses mundiales, World Spanishes/españoles mundiales Respuesta 2 a "¿Españoles mundiales? En busca de un paradigma" Es bienvenida la invitación de ir más allá de una aproximación meramente dialectal y sociolingüística en los estudios del español en el mundo, que nos ha mantenido en…

  • Trump, the Wall and the Spanish Language

    Ilan StavansARTICLEChiricú Journal Latina/o…2017

    Trump, the Wall and the Spanish Language Ilan Stavans (bio) Amherst, Mass.—In an emblematic essay called “The Wall and the Books,” the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote about Shih Huang Ti (also known as Qin Shi Huang), the Chinese emperor who in 220–206 B.C. built the original Great Wall of China. In his essay Borges points out that the same emperor who implemented the project also banned all books from the kingdom. His intention was clea…

  • Disputing Américo Paredes

    Ilan Stavans, Derek GarciaARTICLEAztlán A Journal of Chicano Studies2016

    Other| March 01 2016 Disputing Américo Paredes Ilan Stavans, Ilan Stavans Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College. His books include, most recently, Quixote: The Novel and the World (Norton, 2015) and a new translation of Lazarillo de Tormes (Norton, 2016). He is the general editor of The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (Norton, 2010). Search for other works by this author on: This…

  • Should Books Be Sold

    Ilan StavansARTICLEWorld Literature Today2014

    With bookstores and the publishing world in crisis, could ads within books be the answer? Victoria's Secret in Pride and Prejudice? Abercrombie & Fitch in On the Road? Ilan Stavans looks at what we might learn from both Homer and Netflix

  • Is American Literature Parochial

    Ilan StavansARTICLEWorld Literature Today2013

    26 worldliteraturetoday.org Is American Literature Parochial? Ilan Stavans American exceptionalism makes us believe we are extraordinary. Consequently, we trust our literature is outstanding as well. Truth is, we are as narrow as everyone else, and our literature showcases it. I have no intention of rehearsing yet another diatribe against the Swedish Academy’s Nobel committee in Stockholm, which, as is well known in US publishing circles, hasn’t …

  • Introduction Liberalism and American Jews

    Ilan StavansARTICLEJournal of Modern Jewish Studies2012

    The politics of American Jews are decidedly counter-intuitive. It is a well-known fact among political scientists that the more affluent a group is, the more conservative its ideological affinities