The Professional History of Rolena Adorno.

FGH: What would you like to recall in relation to your training (BA U of Iowa, Spanish, 1964; MA privatim Yale U, 1966; PhD Cornell U, Spanish Literature [sic], 1974)?

RA: I think that the undergraduate experience was really key in my case because I came from a nonacademic family, no one having gone to the university before. And, for me, to discover the humanities, and the study of the Spanish language and literature, although I came to it late, was the most important educational experience I had. What was attractive to me about it was that it was so different from my own cultural background. I had that interest in something that was very different from that which I had known and from which I had come. What sealed that interest for me, although I was trained to be a secondary school teacher and did teach one year, in fact one year after I graduated from college, was the opportunity to have a Fulbright scholarship to Spain. That changed what was already a serious interest, not quite on the spot but over the course of that year in Madrid, into a lifelong commitment and a lifelong passion that I didn't yet know how to give shape to because I married right after that Fulbright year and took over the raising of my husband's four daughters and couldn't yet quite see myself going through graduate school. But I did. It was a natural consequence with very much the support of my family and my husband, David [Adorno] and the girls. The very remarkable master's degree from Yale, is simply the last degree because one has to have a Yale graduate degree in order to be a member of the Yale permanent faculty. So, this in privatim degree is in fact a ceremonial one that means that I teach at Yale as a member of the permanent faculty. My PhD years at Cornell were wildly different than [anything] I had thought they might have been. Simply because I started out looking to study something that I knew something about, which was the theater of Golden-Age Spain as is called, the comedia del Siglo de Oro, and in the course of centering on that historical period the advice given to me was to take a course in the colonial area.