Nancy Abraham Hall

Senior Lecturer Nancy Hall has been a member of the Wellesley College Spanish Department since 1989.  She is a specialist in nineteenth through twenty-first century Hispanic American literature with an interest in how writers work through and against previous texts drawn from a wide variety of cultures, media and disciplines.

Nancy Hall grew up in a bilingual household in Mexico City, attended schools in New York and Vermont, and received a B.A. from Smith College in 1972 with a concentration in Hispanic American Studies. She earned an M.A. (1973) and a Ph.D. (1979) in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University.

While at Harvard, she received the Travel-Study Prize for Excellence in Teaching as well as the Luisa Vidal de Villasante Award for outstanding work in Comparative Literature.

At Wellesley Professor Hall has guided independent studies and senior theses on comparative topics, taught courses on Mexican Literature, the Latin American Short Story and Intermediate Spanish, and coordinated Elementary Spanish.  She currently serves as campus director for Wellesley’s Program for Mexican Culture and Society in Puebla (PMCSP).

Nancy Hall is co-editor of several books: Studies in Honor of Enrique Anderson Imbert; A Necklace of Words: Short Fiction by Mexican Women; and Campo abierto: lecturas sociopolíticas de Hispanoamérica. The bilingual songbook she compiled with Jill Syverson-Stork, Los pollitos dicen/The Baby Chicks Sing, has been cited as a noteworthy book by the Children’s Literature Center of the Library of Congress and is in its third edition.

Scholarly essays published by Professor Hall focus on works by writers Carmen Boullosa, Carlos Fuentes and Justo Sierra (Mexico), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia),  Ricardo Palma (Peru), Alberto Fuguet (Chile), Jorge Luis Borges, Guillermo Martínez, Rodrigo Fresán, Leopoldo Lugones and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (Argentina).  Her many literary translations include two memoirs by Marjorie Agosín (Chile-USA) and poetry by Nancy Morejón (Cuba).

Most recently Professor Hall has analyzed how Carlos Fuentes rereads Thomas Hardy through the lens of bioethicist Henri Atlan’s theories of self-organization.  She currently is studying Carmen Boullosa’s La otra mano de Lepanto in relationship to several works by Cervantes, and examining constructions of the girl in contemporary Mexican fiction.

Nancy lives with her husband, Raymond J. Starr, in Medfield.  Her son Jeffrey directs public relations for a Boston-based labor union and her daughter Meredith studies psychology and art at Wellesley College.