The LAST 100: Hortensia Calvo In Profile

The Stone Center for Latin American Studies is pleased to release the third video from the collection, The LAST 100: In Profile, featuring Hortensia Calvo. 

Hortensia Calvo, Ph.D., has been the Doris Stone Director of The Latin American Library since 2003. She oversees the Library’s administrative functions, collection policies, programs, and services. Her research interests and publications include the Spanish and Spanish American literary Baroque, and the social history of books and print culture in Latin America. Dr. Calvo was also the Executive Director at the Seminar for the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM) from 2005-2023. Watch the profile below and learn more about her.

The Latin American Library will host the 69th annual meeting of SALALM June 9-12 with the theme 5 K’atuns/100 Years Completed: Celebration and Commemorations in Latin America, the Caribbean, Iberia and Their Diasporas. SALALM is the foremost professional association of academic libraries dedicated to the region. Learn more about SALALM 69 by visiting: https://salalm.org/salalm69

In tandem with the SALALM conference, the Library will debut a major exhibition to celebrate the centennial of Latin American studies at Tulane through its own history. The exhibition traces the origins of its special collections in 1924 as part of the Middle American Research Institute, through the establishment of the Latin American Library as such in 1962, and its subsequent growth and development as one of the foremost repositories of its kind in the world today. A central leitmotif is how New Orleans’ historical connections with the Iberian world, beginning with the period when it was under Spanish rule (1762-1801), and with cities along the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean have shaped the Library as it is today. The exhibit also underscores the ways in which collections, services, and archival practices have altered through time according to changing interpretive contexts. The Library will hold a special event in the Fall to open the exhibit to the Tulane and New Orleans communities.

The LAST 100 is among the robust slate of projects and events to celebrate our growth over the past century. We have digitized, assembled, and created documentation of this history with a particular focus starting in the 1940s with the creation of the academic programs on Latin America. The resulting website and digital collection will be publicly released over the summer.
More than fifty In Profile videos will appear on this site alongside multi-media stories that integrate long-form video and audio interviews, historic documents and images, data visualizations, and new perspectives on these histories. 

In the meantime, we're offering a sneak peek into the voices and memories of The LAST 100 community. Follow the Stone Center on social media or subscribe to the newsletter to stay tuned.