• The event will take place on Friday, April 9 at 11:00 am in the Charles E. Young Grand Salon (248 Kerckhoff Hall, UCLA- 306 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90024). Admission is free with prior reservations. To book a reservation, email info@redudg.udg.mx  or visit www.udgla.com

• More information: 241 South Figueroa Street, Suite 370, Los Angeles, CA. 90012 USA. Ph.: 001 (213) 785 13 13 Fax: 001(213) 992 23 72.

• The lecture will be conducted in English. A video will be posted on the Cátedra Julio Cortázar website (www.jcortazar.udg.mx) a few days after the event.

Lecture topic:

The lecture “To Be or Not to Be Multilingual” will deal with multilingualism and the current status of native North American and Latin American languages, their presence and their contributions to world culture. From a global perspective, multilingualism could be the rule and not the exception in the modern-day United States. Recent research points to significant benefits to be derived from multilingualism, ranging from those enjoyed by individuals who speak more than one language to those affecting the society at large.

Contact:

Los Angeles, California:
Carmen Cervantes
Gabriel Sotomayor

Ph. (213) 785 1313

JARED DIAMOND
UCLA geography professor Jared Diamond has authored books such as Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Guns, Germs and Steel, the latter of which won him a Pulitzer Prize as well as the Aventis Prize for Science Books in the UK. He received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in addition to awards from the American Physiological Society, the National Geographic Society and the Zoological Society of San Diego. Diamond has also been awarded a number of honorary degrees and received countless other recognitions, prizes and medals from institutions throughout the world. He was a founding board member of the Society of Conservation Biology and serves as US regional director of the World Wide Fund for Nature.

CARLOS FUENTES
Carlos Fuentes is a Mexican novelist and essayist whose work is generally considered among the most important of the so-called “Latin American Boom” literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s. His painstaking examination of Mexico and that which is Mexican, combined with a literary style that makes use of unflinching and original language, including newly-coined terms, crude colloquialisms and foreign expressions, helped establish him as a formidable figure on the 20th century Mexican literary scene. He delves into the worlds of the individual subconscious and society and brings them into the realm of Mexican literature with remarkable vigor.

Fuentes was awarded the Premio Cervantes in 1987, and in 1994 he won the Premio Príncipe de Asturias for literature. Some of his most outstanding works of fictiona are: La región más transparente (1958), La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), Zona sagrada (1967), Terra Nostr (1975), Cristóbal Nonato (1987), Diana o la cazadora solitaria (1994), Constancia y otras novelas para vírgenes (1990), El naranjo o los círculos del tiempo (1993), La frontera de cristal (1995), La campaña (1990), Los años con Laura Díaz (1999), Instinto de Inez (2001), La silla del águila (2003), Todas las familias felices (2005), La voluntad y la fortuna (2008) and Adán en Edén (2009).

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