Noël Valis awarded Summer Residency by National Humanities Center

Noël Valis, Kingman Brewster, Jr. Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, has been invited to the National Humanities Center's 2026 Select Summer Residency Program.

Valis will be one of 40 summer residents welcomed to the National Humanities Center campus for the month of June. There, residents will be supported with research materials as they work on individual humanities-focused research projects and participate in the Center's intellectual community.  

"I am thrilled to be part of the special community of scholars that the NHC Select Summer Residency represents," Valis said. "While there, I will be working on a book project centered on two of twentieth-century Spain's greatest poets, The Wounds of Poetry: Elegy in Federico García Lorca and Luis Cernuda. So there you have it:  joy and melancholy all in one!"

Valis is a leading scholar and translator of Spanish literature. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has previously been awarded fellowships from Fulbright Program, Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among numerous other honors and awards.  

Her most recent book, Lorca After Life (Yale University Press, 2022)—which explores how poet and playwright Federico García Lorca's life, death, and art continue to reverberate through history and culture—won the 2023 PROSE Award for Literature from the Association of American Publishers.

Valis will be part of the seventh class of summer residents to be welcomed to the NHC campus in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The incoming class of residents was selected by a competitive process for the first time in the history of the NHC.

The National Humanities Center is a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing discovery about the human experience, fostering community among humanities practitioners, and empowering all those seeking to better understand and improve the human condition.