Upon joining the Lawrence faculty in 2000, Gustavo Fares, associate professor and chair of the Department of Spanish, brought to the college a portfolio of talents, experience, and training that models for his students some of the best qualities of the liberally educated mind.
Born in Argentina and resident in the United States since 1985, Fares holds a doctorate in Latin American literature from the University of Pittsburgh; master's degrees in foreign languages and literature and in fine arts, painting, and printmaking from West Virginia University; and a law degree from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, as well as postgraduate studies in painting, drawing, and art history at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Ernesto de la Cárcova in Buenos Aires.
As a new faculty member, he quickly began to share his breadth of interests and depth of knowledge with the campus community, delivering the opening lecture for a Wriston Art Center Galleries exhibition titled "Artistas Argentinos Contemporáneos," in which he was one of the four contemporary Argentinian artists represented. Later in the 2000-2001 academic year he delivered a campus lecture examining the works of Spanish painters Francisco de Goya and Salvador Dali and their efforts to provide society with a moral code.
Off-campus, his research and publishing efforts included a review of Discurso e historia en la obra narrativa de Jorge Luis Borges, by Nicolás Emilio Alvarez, in the Modern Language Review and a paper titled "Borges' Women in Film" presented at the 25th Colloquium on Literature and Film at West Virginia University and scheduled to be a chapter in a forthcoming book on Borges.