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Jean Franco, professor emerita of Spanish at Columbia University, will give the annual Robert C. Elliott Memorial Lecture at 7 p.m. May 13 in the Institute of the Americas Building Complex at the University of California, San Diego. Her topic is Latin American Culture and the Cold War.

Franco is one of today’s leading authorities on literature, culture, and politics in Latin America. She has written extensively on nationalism, postnationalism and gender issues and was a pioneer in the study of popular culture and mass media in the Americas. She is the author of The Modern Culture of Latin America; Cesar Vallejo: The Dialectics of Poetry and Silence; Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico, and a book on Latin American feminism, Marcar Diferencias, Cruzar Fronteras.

Franco has taught at London University, the University of Essex, Stanford University, and Columbia. She is currently writing a book on her lecture topic, Latin American culture and the Cold War.

The Elliott Memorial Lecture is presented annually by the UCSD Department of Literature, with support from the Robert C. Elliott Memorial Fund. The fund was established at the time of Professor Elliott’s death in 1981. Elliott was a founding member of the department and author of The Power of Satire (1968), The Shape of Utopia (1970), and The Literary Persona (1982). The UCSD Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies assisted with this year’s event.