Elena Pellús Pérez - K:REW - Knowledge: Research, Education/Editing & Writing

Director

Elena is Licenciada in Hispanic Studies from the University of Alicante (Spain, 2001) with a major in Latin American literatures and a minor in Latin. She has a MA (2008), a MPhil (2009) and a PhD in Spanish (2012) from Yale University, with a minor in Portuguese. She currently directs the KREW project and works as a freelance language and culture especialist for different clients. She lives between the USA and Spain.

The reading of the world precedes the reading of the word.

She is the founder and director of KREW, where she currently works as a freelance language and culture specialist.

Elena taught Spanish at the University of Alicante (Spain, 2004), and Spanish and Spanish and Latin American literatures & cultures at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (2012-2013), Yale University (2009-2013), Arizona State University (2004-2006) and Xavier University (2003). She also taught intermediate and advanced English to both children and adults at the Instituto de Idiomas Modernos Jesuita de Alicante (Spain) (2014-2018), and as Adjunct Professor at the CEU University Cardenal Herrera (Elche, Spain) (2020-2023), teaching English in the School of Education. She collaborated with the former Foundation of the University of Alicante in the Specialization Course on Brewing Basics (2013-2016).

She also collaborated with Santillana Publishing Company creating language activities (2018), worked as a transcriber for Yale Open Courses (2009), and as an editor, coordinator, researcher and Deputy Director of the Latin America Area at the Digital Library Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra of the University of Alicante (1998-2001).

Her research focuses on the cultural and ideological connections between 15th-17th century Spain and the Americas. Her areas of study are Colonial Latin American literature, Spanish Golden Age, History of Ideas, and contemporary Latin American literature. Ideological connections between the past and the present, as well as the cultural similarities and differences that settle between cultures is another area of interest.

She studied and updated the translation of the incomplete chronicle on the deeds of Hernan Cortés (De rebus gestis Ferdinandi Cortesii) from its manuscript, which was in unknown location since 1782, and whose only edition dated from 1858, apart from helping clear the issue of its authorship. This first book, Sobre las hazañas de Hernán Cortés, was published in 2007, in the Collection Cuadernos de América sin nombre by the Centre of Studies Mario Benedetti from the University of Alicante.

She has also completed the first monographic study on the life and books of the Spanish humanist Hernán Pérez de Oliva (¿1494?-1531), underlying among its rhetorical, philosophical and historical works the Historia de la invención de las Indias (History on the Invention of the Indies) as the consolidation of the author’s humanist commitment, as well as an early vision of the topics that would occupy the debates of the following decades. Entre el Renacimiento y el Nuevo Mundo: vida y obras de Hernán Pérez de Oliva (¿1494?-1531) is part of the collection Parecos y Australes: ensayos de la cultura de la colonia of Iberoamericana Vervuert Verlag (2014).

She is currently interested in the relationship that contemporary Mexican literature establishes with its cultural roots, and in how the ideological imaginary that underlies specific cultural expressions of nowadays Hispanic cultures connect directly with their remote historical past. Her professional career led her to analyze and study the cultural differences that intervene in communication, whether verbal, written, or non verbal.