Ralph Difranco

Professor DiFranco received his BA degree at Cleveland State University, his MA degree from Middlebury College and his doctorate from the University of Southern California. Since 1978 he has been on the Spanish faculty in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Denver. His scholarship done in tandem with Professor emeritus José J. Labrador Herraiz focuses on preserving and providing access to Spanish manuscript poetic texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Since 1986, the team has published more than 30 books that can be found in libraries on several continents. The team garnered three research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1997, 1999, 2001) to prepare a database of Spanish Golden Age verse. It presently documents some 93,000 poems found in 1275 manuscripts and printed books held in nearly 100 different libraries in EUrope and the Americas. In 2006 DiFranco was honored as a Distinguished Alumni of Cleveland State University. In 2008, he received the José Vasconcelos Silver Medal for his work in promoting the study of Hispanic literature and culture from the Mexican cultural Foundation Frente de Afirmación Hispanista. In 2011 he was the recipient of the José Vasconcelos Gold Medal award from the same foundation.

• Ph.D., SPanish and Medieval Studies, University of Southern California, 1978
• MA, Spanish, Middlebury COllege, 1974
• BA, Spanish, Cleveland State University, 1973