Spanish and Film Professor’s Research Attracts International Interest

Professor of Spanish and Film, Dona Kercher, Ph.D., recently presented research on Spanish and Argentinian films at the XIV Congreso de Novela y Cine Negro (Conference on Film Noir and Crime Fiction) at the University of Salamanca in Spain. During the conference, Prof. Kercher delivered a paper entitled “Profundidades psíquicas y políticas: Ricardo Darín en recientes co-producciones español-argentinas” (“Psychic and Political Depths: Ricardo Darín in Recent Spanish- Argentine co-Productions”).

Prof. Kercher’s research represents a portion of a book she is writing on Ricardo Darín, a renowned Argentinian actor. Conference organizers, who invited her to attend the conference and share her scholarly work on the occasion, were intrigued by a book she authored, Latin Hitchcock (Columbia UP, 2015).

In Salamanca, Prof. Kercher met with Jose Garcia (Class of 2019), a History Major and Latin American Studies Minor, studying abroad with the AIFS program during the spring semester. Together they toured the city market. While in Spain she conducted research at the Madrid Film Archives and gathered materials for a course she will teach in the fall, “Sports in the Hispanic World”.

In addition to the presentation at the University of Salamanca, Prof. Kercher, gave two additional talks during the last academic year: one at the University of Deusto- San Sebastián in November and another at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in Toronto in March. At the conferences in Spain she delivered her papers in Spanish.

The scholarly work Prof. Kercher presented in San Sebastián on Pedro Almodóvar’s film Julieta (2016) was published in Representaciones artísticas y sociales del envejecimiento [Artists and Social Representations of Ageing] (Dykson P, 2018), which focuses on the aging process in artistic fields and the impact of media.

Prof. Dona Kercher received her Bachelor’s degree in German and Spanish at the University of Michigan. She then attended the John Hopkins University where she earned a Master’s and Doctor of Philosophy degree in Spanish. Prof. Kercher teaches in three academic programs at Assumption including Spanish, Latin American and Latino Studies, and Women’s Studies, and has taught a variety of undergraduate courses, including multiple courses on film, within those academic programs.