Distinguished Professor Award
DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR AWARD
Iride Lamartina-Lens
Professor, Modern Languages and Cultures
Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
Iride Lamartina-Lens is a Professor of Spanish language, literature, culture and translation in the Department of Modern Languages, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences of Pace University on the New York City Campus. She received a BA from Brooklyn College and MA and PhD from Rutgers The State University of New Jersey. She is the recipient of the Kenan Award of Excellence in Teaching (2003), and the first editor outside of Spain to be awarded the prestigious, Premio a la Mejor Labor Editorial 2015 (Award for Best Editor 2015) by the Dramatists Guild of Spain (AAT) for the annual drama translation series, Estreno Contemporary Spanish Plays.
Professor Lamartina-Lens has an established national and international reputation as a scholar and translator of contemporary theater of Spain. She has published numerous articles in the field, co-authored several critical Spanish theater anthologies that are widely used in academic courses throughout the nation, and contributed a substantial number of book chapters, encyclopedia entries, prologues and introductions included in academic manuscripts or anthologies on contemporary Spanish theater. Many of her translations have been published and, more importantly, staged at commercial and university venues both in the United States and abroad, including in South Korea and India. Her area of expertise in Spanish theater has remained three-pronged: first, as a researcher of both renowned and emerging living Spanish dramatists, especially women authors; secondly, an English translator of Spanish plays; and lastly, as an editor of Estreno Contemporary Spanish Plays (43 volumes), the only annual translation series of Spanish plays in the English-speaking world. Her work as global propagator of Spanish theater throughout the English-speaking nations has caught the attention of the Spanish Embassy in Washington, DC, and she now collaborates with the cultural division of the Embassy on their yearly event, Spotlight on Contemporary Spanish Theater that features staged readings by distinguished US directors/actors of translations published in the Estreno Plays series.
Since her arrival at Pace University in 1984, Professor Lamartina-Lens has been a teacher/scholar intent on linking classroom learning of foreign language with scholarship, and cultural and linguistic immersion. She has taught and organized more than 20 faculty-led Pace study abroad courses throughout Europe and Latin America; and mentored undergraduate language students to translate and publish theatrical texts. She has done extensive work in curriculum development and spearheaded the creation of two interdisciplinary major programs, Language, Culture and World Trade (LWT), and Modern Languages and Cultures (MLC), and most recently, co-created a minor in Translation Studies. Professor Lamartina-Lens served as Chair of the Modern Languages Department in PNY from 1990-2013.