Darío Villanueva

(Vilalba, Spain, 1950). He obtained his Ph.D. in Hispanic Philology from the Autonomous University of Madrid. He is professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela, a university from which he received a degree in Humanities in 1972 and of which he was rector from 1994 to 2002. During his appointment as rector, he presided over the Fundación Empresa Universidad de Galicia (FEUGA), was member of the Administrative Council and the Executive Commission of the PORTAL UNIVERSIA S. A. and created UNIRISCO GALICIA S. C. R., the first venture capital partnership conceived to finance projects based on the transfer of knowledge from universities to the business world.

He has been awarded Honoris Causa  degrees by seven universities from the UK, Sweden, the U.S., Argentina and Peru. He was Vice-President of the Conferencia de Rectores de las Universidades Españolas (CRUE), and president of both the Red de Bibliotecas Universitarias Españolas (REBIUN) and the Spanish Association of General and Comparative Literature. He was also member of the Executive Board of the "International Comparative Literature Association/Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée." Among his titles, El polen de ideas. Teoría, Crítica, Historia y Literatura comparada  (1991) and Trayectoria de la novela hispanoamericana actual (1991), co-written with J.M. Viña Liste and translated into Arabic by Egypt's Superior Council of Culture in 1998. Another of his works, Teorías del realismo literario [Theories of Literary Realism] (1992), was translated into English by the State University of New York Press in 1997. He had already published in English in 1994 a volume edited jointly with Silvia L. López and Jenaro Taléns: Critical Practices in post-Franco Spain, published by the University of Minnesota Press. Besides La poética de la lectura en Quevedo (University of Manchester, 1995) and Valle-Inclán, novelista del Modernismo (2005), the City University of New York and the University of Valladolid published in 2008 his book Imágenes de la ciudad. Poesía y cine, de Whitman a Lorca, which has just received the international prize research in the Humanities awarded by the Sociedad Menéndez Pelayo. Also in 2008 , Las fábulas mentirosas. Lectura, realidad, ficción was published in Mexico by the Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes. Since 2008 he holds the "D" seat at the Royal Spanish Academy of Language, of which he is the current Secretary. His admission speech focused on the topic El Quijote antes del cinema.