Dr. J. Yuri Porras

Office: Centennial 137
Phone: 512.245.2466
E-mail: porras@txstate.edu

Biography: Dr. Jorge Yuri Porras is Professor of Spanish at Texas State University and the Spanish Graduate Program Advisor. He received a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in Early Modern Peninsular Literatures and cultures with a minor in Theater. While formally trained in literature, culture, civilization, and history of the Spanish Golden Age, his interests, both as regards scholarship and teaching, include film, semiotics, gender, performance studies, and most especially, music-text interrelations, particularly, in drama. He holds a B.A. in voice performance from Sonoma State University in California (CSU), and in the past has been a featured soloist and lead performer in a number of oratorios, operas, operettas, musical theater, and Zarzuela in venues throughout Northern California. Dr. Porras has also co-coordinated and performed in interdisciplinary music concerts for conferences in recent years.

Aside from having restructured and coordinated the first-year Spanish program, served on and chaired faculty search committees, he serves on the board of directors of AHCT (Association of Hispanic Classical Theater), and has co-directed the first summer session of faculty-led study abroad program in Valladolid, Spain between 2007-2012, and he will reassume the charge until summer 2018.

Research Interests: Dr. Porras has maintained an intense research agenda, frequently presenting at several conferences in the United States, Puerto Rico, England, and Spain, and has published various peer-reviewed articles on the role of music in Iberian Theater in highly regarded national and international journals, as well as several book chapters on various subjects ranging from the theater of Juan del Encina, Gil Vicente, Lucas Fernández, and La Celestina, Golden Age Comedia, to the eighteenth-century Tonadilla escénica and nineteenth-century Zarzuela.