People, Papers and Presentations

James Castañeda, professor of Spanish, delivered the lecture “The Reconquest of Spain” while serving as faculty host on the Association of Rice Alumni’s trip “Andalucía in a Spanish Parador,” in Ronda, Spain, June 8. He delivered a paper, “Valle-Inclán y la Leyenda de Don Juan,” at the IV Congress of the Asociación Hispánica de Humanidades, in Madrid, Spain, June 26, and “Viaje por los Pueblos de España a Través del Teatro” at the annual convention of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese July 2 in Salamanca, Spain.

Lane Kauffmann, associate professor of Spanish, presented “José Ortega y Gasset y la Reivindicación del Ensayo” at an international conference on the work of Spanish philosopher José Ortega held in Madrid, Spain. Kauffmann also presented invited papers on the essay genre at the American Comparative Literature Association’s annual meeting at Princeton University and at the International Association of Philosophy and Literature’s 30th annual meeting in Freiburg, Germany; Basel, Switzerland; and Strasbourg, France, June 5-10. Kauffmann was one of a dozen invited specialists on the essay — and the only scholar from the United States — to participate in the public colloquium, “L’Essai: La Liberté de L’Esprit,” held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France June 10. His presentation was titled “L’Essai: Ses Contraintes et sa Liberté par Rapport aux Sciences Humaines.”

Moshe Vardi won the IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computeer Science (LICS) Test-of-Time Award, which recognizes authors of a small number of influential papers that appeared in the LICS proceedings from 20 years prior. His paper was titled “An Automata-Theoretic Approach to Automatic Program Verification.” Vardi is the Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering, professor of computer science, and director of the Computer and Information Technology Institute.

Entries for “People, Papers, Presentations” should be submitted to the Office of News and Media Relations by e-mail, <ricenews@rice.edu>; fax, 713-348-6380; or campus mail, MS 300. Entries will run on a space-available basis.