Hispanic Studies

HISTORY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HISPANIC STUDIES

Terence T. Folley, Emeritus Professor of Spanish

The English Hispanist, the late JB Trend of Cambridge University once wrote, in his book 'The Civilization of Spain', that Spanish as a subject taught gained a toe-hold in British Universities in general during the 1914-18 Great War. He added that since then it never relinquished that toe-hold. His words sum up the introduction of Spanish into University College Cork. During the First World War, German, the language of the enemy, ceased to be popular as a second linguistic option to French. Spanish became the obvious choice, and it was offered as a subject for the B.A. degree in 1916.

The first lecturer in Spanish at UCC was a colourful personality, W.C. Cooke, who was a practising solicitor in Cork city. He had worked for many years in the West Indies and had acquired his Spanish in contacts with South America. In his interest in Latin-American Spanish and culture, W.C. Cooke was in advance of his time, when Spanish Studies in Europe concentrated mainly on Peninsular Spain. The latter also interested Mr Cooke, and in the library he donated to UCC there are examples of correspondence between him and outstanding Spanish literary personalities of the time, for instance the poet, Manuel Machado, brother of the poet, Antonio Machado.

W.C. Cooke retired from UCC in 1936 and the late Dr J.G. Healy became the first full-time statutory lecturer in the Spanish department. Dr Healy had in his turn a colourful personality. He had fluency in Irish and German as well as Spanish and Italian. A graduate of UCC, he studied in Germany in the early 1930s, a very agitated period in the country prior to the Nazi take-over of power. His doctorate was on the German presence in the discovery and colonization of South America. Although the Spanish civil war of 1936-39 greatly boosted interest abroad in the language, Dr Healy took on the task of expanding the department in difficult times. Travel to Spain for study purposes was not feasible, and the isolation was intensified at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, months after the Spanish conflict ended.

Dr Healy was also a reserve officer in the Irish army, attached to intelligence. In the early years of the war, he was recalled to the forces. Because the Spanish department at the time, and also a number of other academic departments, were staffed by one lone academic head (and factotum), UCC was for a while without a lecturer in Spanish. The gap was temporarily filled by recruiting a teacher of Spanish and French, Mr Buckley. The latter also brought his share of colour to the department. He had acquired his knowledge of Spanish in Latin-America and attained a considerable degree of fluency in the language, but it appears his contacts in the years spent in Argentina and Uruguay were among the emigré Basque communities there. Consequently he spoke Spanish with a pronounced Basque accent and visiting Spaniards to Cork who met him for the first time assumed he was a Basque refugee from the Spanish Civil War. He was also a very good teacher of Spanish, energetic, demanding, his fluency in the language to some extent compensating for the lack of a native lector in the department.

After the cessation of the war in Europe in 1945, Dr Healy returned to head the department. Spanish was offered to undergraduates in the B.A. and the B.Comm degrees and an increase of students by day and by night-in the evening courses-imposed long contact hours on Dr Healy. By the mid-1950s however, he finally acquired the services of a native Spanish lector and of a full-time teaching assistant. In 1958, Dr Healy became the first Professor of Spanish in UCC. He died while still an active departmental head in 1963, and the following year the NUI Senate appointed the late NiallJ. Ware to the Chair of Spanish. Dr Ware, the second Professor of Spanish in UCC, was a medievalist, and he brought a considerable input of further scholarship to the department. For the first time the library grant was increased to an acceptable level and a full-time assistant and a lector became a permanent feature of the departmental staffing. In 1969 the assistantship was raised to a statutory lectureship, but it was not until 1975 that a second, much needed assistant lecturer was employed, making it possible at last for staff members to arrange long-overdue sabbatical study leave. In the 1950s and into the 1960s, very large numbers of undergraduate students, almost entirely beginners in the language, took Spanish. Much departmental time went to coping with the sheer pressure of numbers in the classrooms. In the mid-1960s, courses were no longer offered to beginners, and the number of students taking Spanish dropped dramatically. As the secondary schools responded numbers began to climb again, reaching a point in the early 1970s that justified, in administrative opinion, an increase in the departmental staffing.

The additional staff member appointed in 1975, Dr T. O?Reilly, a graduate of Nottingham, was a Golden Age specialist. However, the promising situation was radically altered for a time with the sudden death, in his early 40s, of Professor Ware, in 1978. In the autumn of that year, the NUI Senate appointed Dr T. Folley, a specialist in 19th and 20th century Peninsular Spanish studies, former departmental assistant since 1963 and Statutory Lecturer since 1969, to the chair of Spanish - the third Professor of Spanish in UCC. At the same time, an additional assistant lecturer, S. Boyd, a graduate of St Andrews University and also a Golden Age specialist, was appointed, and the department began to recover the interrupted momentum of the decade. Part-time teaching assistants were employed and a full time lector. New courses were introduced, particularly Catalan and Portuguese, as two-year options in the undergraduate courses. When the Erasmus system was introduced in the 1980s, the department became fully involved in the programme for student mobility and foreign exchange, starting with Burgos, Spain, and later expanding to Barcelona and other Spanish third level institutions. Later, the University of Coimbra, Portugal , became part of the exchange scheme.

In the decade 1990-2000, a Language Centre was created and the teachers of the language serviced the latter?s linguistic needs through the newly-established Centre. Staff sabbaticals, many lasting an entire academic year or more, became a standard procedure in the pursuit of scholarly and research interests as a further enhancement of the department?s standing, Dr O?Reilly was appointed Associate Professor of Spanish, while Dr Anne Walsh specialising in 20th century Spanish literature, was appointed College Lecturer in 1996. The department hosted several congresses, eg. the Fifth Centenary of Columbus?s Discovery of America, and the Sixth Centenary of the Birth of Prince Henry the Navigator, father of the Portuguese voyages of Discovery in the 15th century. Extensive contact with the appropriate embassies in Dublin was established, and the initial contact with the Mexican Embassy brought to a UCC postgraduate student the first scholarship granted in Ireland to academic institutions, to study for a year in Mexico. As a further incentive, over the years Spain offered study scholarships to undergraduate students, while prizes, based on academic work, were introduced, such as the J. Healy and N.J. Ware memorial prizes.

Professor T. Folley retired from the chair of Spanish in 1996, and in 1997 Dr D. Mackenzie was appointed the fourth Professor of Spanish in UCC. Under his leadership, there has been further considerable expansion of the department, notably the creation of the official Centre for Mexican Studies in Ireland within the renamed Department of Hispanic Studies, together with the appointment in 1999 of Dr Nuala Finnegan from the University of Limerick, a specialist in Mexican Studies. Professor Mackenzie, a medievalist and specialist in Galician studies, has also introduced the latter to the department, set up the Irish Centre for Galician Studies, and established a thriving student exchange with the University of Santiago de Compostela. In 2002 the department participated in the commemoration of the Battle of Kinsale and it hosted the Annual Conference of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland.

A word might be added in conclusion concerning a further aspect, which has become vital to a thriving academic department. Initially, secretarial services were non-existent, or at most, basic. Correspondence etc. was for years handled by a general secretarial centre, until the department acquired an individual secretary, Kay Doyle, in 1980, a service shared for 15 years with German and Italian and after 1995 with Italian only. This situation was finally remedied on the opening of the O?Rahilly building, where the members of the department, along with colleagues from other related disciplines equally disadvantaged, now enjoy secretarial facilities long taken for granted in other academic institutions, with Sinead O?Callaghan joining Kay Doyle in April 1998.

Such has been the gradual evolution of the department, from its humble origins during the war-to-end-all-wars, through the deprived 1930s and the isolation of the Second World War, to the point at which it now stands, a flourishing department of Spanish and cognate studies, nearly at the completion of its first centenary. Since its creation, the department has had the services of a great variety of interests in its staff, each of whom in his or her individual way has contributed, often in discouragingly adverse circumstances, to furthering Hispanic Studies in UCC. The record of the department argues favourably for the further development of Spanish and cognate studies in the College in the century that lies ahead.