Thursday, April 9, 2026 (5:00-6:30 pm Boston) in the Observatorio of Instituto Cervantes at Harvard
1100 Massachusetts Ave · 2nd floor · Cambridge, MA 02138 · USA
RSVP: https://forms.gle/dqMixt1XtMaC5xDn7 or info-observatory@fas.harvard.edu
The Observatorio del Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University, in collaboration with Boston University, presents a lecture-concert that alternates between critical commentary and live musical performance. Professor Christopher Maurer, one of the leading experts on the work of Federico García Lorca, and concert guitarist and researcher Samuel Diz engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue on an essential aspect of Lorca's life and poetry: traditional Spanish music.
Christopher Maurer, a professor at Boston University, is the editor and translator of Federico García Lorca, How a City Sings from November to November: Lorca on Music (Swan Isle Press, 2026), as well as the author of numerous works on Spanish poetry. Professor Maurer is a leading expert on the work of Federico García Lorca. His research focuses on Spanish poetry and its connections with other arts—such as music and painting—as well as on translation and textual criticism. He is the editor of Collected Poems, a revised edition of Lorca’s complete poetry in English, of Epistolario completo (co-edited with Andrew A. Anderson), and of several key collections of the Granada-born writer’s poetry and prose, including Selected Verse, Conferencias, y Prosa inédita de juventud. He is a full member of the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española, and he combines his research with teaching at Boston University, where he teaches in the MFA program in Literary Translation. We are also proud to count him among the members of the Observatory’s Executive Committee.
Samuel Diz is a concert guitarist and a researcher specializing in the music of Spain’s Generation of ’27 and the Spanish Republican exile. His discography includes Impresiones y paisajes—named after Lorca’s first book—Memoria de la melancolía, recorded at the Huerta de San Vicente using Federico García Lorca’s historic guitar, and El mal de l’amor: The Songbook of Gustavo Durán. He is currently coordinating the preparation of the annotated music catalog and collected correspondence of Gustavo Durán at the Residencia de Estudiantes. Diz holds a degree in classical guitar from the Conservatorio Superior de Sevilla and a master’s in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies from the Universidad Internacional de Valencia. He has performed at universities such as Yale, Boston, Oxford and UNAM, and at venues including the Juan March Foundation and the Palau de la Música Catalana, where he received the Premio de la Crítica “El Primer Palau”.