Linda Willem

Linda M. Willem is the Betty Blades Lofton Professor of Spanish and teaches in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures & Cultures.  She holds a PH.D. from UCLA in Spanish Language and Literature. Her primary area of specialization is 19th-century Spanish literature. with a secondary research focus on Spanish film.  Among her six book-length publications are a monograph on the novels of Benito Pérez Galdós with the University of North Carolina Press and a collection of Carlos Saura's interviews, which she compiled, translated, and edited for the University of Mississippi Press's Conversations with Filmmakers Series.  Her latest book (Adapting Spanish Classics for the New Millennium: The Nineteenth-Century Novel Remediated) from Palgrave-Macmillan examines radical 21st-century adaptations (in film, television, theater, opera and the graphic novel) of 19th-century Spanish novels. She has published over 40 articles on Spanish literature, film, television, and adaptation in peer-reviewed journals and in book collections published by university presses.  She also has presented her work at numerous national and international conferences, and is the recipient of four NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) awards. 

She has served on the Executive Board of the Asociación Internacional de Galdosistas (International Association of Galdós Scholars) as its President (2018-2020), Secretary-Treasurer (2007-2016), vocal (2002-2005) and ex-oficio advisor (2021-2023).  She also is on the Editorial Board of Anales Galdosianos and has been named a Galdosiana de Honor by the Casa-Museo Pérez Galdós and the Cabildo de Gran Canaria.  She recently was elected as an Académica correspondiente of ANLE (Academia Norteamernicana de la Lengua Española/North-American Academy of the Spanish Language) and has received Butler University's Distinguished Professor Award.  She also has been given the Distinguished Wold Languages Researcher Award for 2024 from the Indiana Foreign Language Teachers Association and is being inducted into the Orden de Don Quijote by the Sigma Delta Pi National Spanish Honor Sociey in 2025.