REGINA HARRISON's scholarship combines the disciplines of anthropology and literature, as reflected in her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her book Signs, Songs, and Memory in the Andes: Translating Quechua Language and Culture (University of Texas, 1989) received the first Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Prize from the Modern Language Association in 1991, and was also awarded prizes from the Latin American Studies Association and the New England Council of Latin American Studies. A Professor in Spanish and Comparative Literature and affiliate Professor in Anthropology, Harrison teaches Quechua, the language spoken by the Incas, as well as Latin American cultures and literatures.  Her third book, Entre el tronar épico y el llanto elegíaco (Quito, Ecuador; 1997), analyzes the use of the Indian symbol in poetry as Ecuador “negotiates nation” in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her video, "Ethno-Tourism in Ecuador:  Cashing in on Paradise" (2001), presents the acceptance of tourists in a tropical forest village of 150 indigenous Quichua-speaking families.  Harrison's current research includes a reading of confession manuals and sermons written in Spanish and Quechua to determine domains of cultural similarity and difference between Spaniards and Incan peoples in the colonial Andes.  She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, and later lived with indigenous communities in the tropical forest and the Andes, collecting over 500 Quechua songs.  Her research has been sponsored by the Guggenheim Foundation, S.S.R.C., A.C.L.S., Rockefeller, Fulbright, N.E.H., and the Mellon Foundation. Harrison was named Distinguished Kreeger Wolf Visiting Professor at Northwestern University for 1996-97.  She is also a Visiting Faculty member at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar (Quito, Ecuador) and at the Centro Bartolome de las Casas (Cuzco, Peru). "Cashing in on Paradise" (2001), Regina Harrison's 27-minute documentary video is now available in a Spanish version, with narrative script and English interviews translated.  The Spanish version "Cuandrando cuentas en el paraíso" was screened in the Latin American Studies meetings in Washington, D.C. and will be shown in the First Peoples' Festival in Montreal in June, 2002.  Additional classroom screenings have taken place this year at Florida Atlantic University, George Mason University, and in April Householder's video class in CMLT, UMCP.

rh79@umail.umd.edu

http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Colleges/ARHU/Depts/SpanishPortuguese/spanfac/RHarrison/index.html