The Cervantes Institute launches an online programme of interviews with leading hispanists

This Friday, the Cervantes Institute is inaugurating a programme of interviews with prominent hispanists, carried out in video format at its headquarters in Madrid and in its centres around the world. The meetings are hosted on the YouTube platform, a social network that registers more than 2,000 million users every month.

Hispanistas en el Cervantes starts this Friday, December 18, with an interview with Professor of the Spanish Language Ndioro Sow, who is the driving force behind the first Hispanic Philology course in the African country in 2011 and the architect of the cooperation between Saint Louis University and Spain.

For this reason, in 2019 the Spanish Government awarded him the Cross of the Order of Isabel the Catholic, for being one of the teachers who have most contributed to the growth of the language of Miguel de Cervantes in Senegal.

Today, it is the third country in sub-Saharan Africa with the most students of our language, only behind the Ivory Coast (566,000) and Benin (412,000). This talk was part of the tenth edition of the Tribuna del Hispanismo, held in Dakar on 1 December, dedicated to Senegalese Hispanism.

In addition, alongside this first premiere, there will be dialogues with John H. Elliot (England), winner of the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences in 1996; Shmuel Refael-Vivante (Israel), founder of the School of Sephardic Studies; Jean Canavaggio (France), winner of the Gouncourt Award and Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X The Wise; and Maria Caterina Ruta (Italy), commissioned by the Order of Isabel the Catholic.

The contents - prepared ad hoc for this new space - will be published every month on the Cervantes Institute's YouTube channel, dialogues that will coincide with the participation of the specialists in the Tribune of Hispanism.

The Tribune of Hispanism is a meeting forum for renowned international Hispanists organised by the Cervantes Institute. The objectives of these conferences are to publicise the history, trajectory and specificities of Hispanic studies in different countries or geographical areas, to analyse some specific aspect of Hispanism and to pay tribute to scholars of Hispanic cultures.

All the events at the Tribunes are recorded live and published in their own space on the official Cervantes Institute YouTube channel.

Users who subscribe to the YouTube channel will receive updates when new episodes with the interviews are published, which they can access immediately.

The Instituto Cervantes has been a pioneer from the beginning in approaching technologies and social networks to adapt them to the dissemination of its online Spanish courses or cultural activities around the world. Together with Hispanistas en el Cervantes, in May 2020 it also created the Casa Cervantes podcast channel on the iVoox platform. A project that is updated every day and which reinforces the commitment to be present in a wide range of innovative formats.

It includes 'My favourite passage from Don Quixote' -extracts read by cultural personalities such as Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa; a talk by David Trueba from Naples on film and literature; an interview with Joaquín Sabina by Luis García Montero; and a dialogue from Manila with Javier Gómez Santander, the chief scriptwriter of the Spanish series 'La casa de papel'. Now the institution is taking a new step in the dissemination of Spanish with Hispanistas at the Cervantes.

Information provided by José Antonio Sierra, advisor to Hispanismo.