Harvey Sullivan

                                                         

Myself on a visit to the grave of Henri Matisse, Nice, France.        

 

           Since my birth in East Tennessee, my life has diverged from the roads most frequented by many a weary traveler. I have possessed a passion for languages, especially Romance, travel, and history since childhood.  I followed my love much as did the hopeless romantic José de Espronceda, and it led me to a specialization in Spanish and foreign studies in my undergraduate years at Randolph-Macon College, and graduate studies in Spanish literature at the University of Virginia and the University of Florida.  Espronceda, author of El Estudiante de Salamanca, would also no doubt be quite pleased that I had spent the summer of 2002 working as a translator for student groups in the university town which is the site of his renowned work. 

       I have taught Spanish both at the university level and the high school level. As life tends to do, mine seems to have come full circle, depositing me on the banks of my own birthplace where I have taken a position most recently at Jefferson County High School in Dandridge, Tennessee. There, I teach Spanish I and Spanish II, courses through which I seek to impart my own effervescent enthusiasm to my students. I am a member of Sigma Delta Pi Spanish Fraternity and sponsor of the Spanish club at my school, through which I seek to foment the love of Hispanic studies in other young people.

   A wise person once said that he who has not traveled has read but a page in the book of life; thus, accompanying my studies have been extensive travels, to countries such as Spain, France, Mexico, Italy and Portugal. My sixth trip to Europe was realized in the summer of 2006.

       I have an voracious and insatiable appetite for Spanish literature, most notably the leaves of such authors as Benito Pérez Galdós and his works such as Los Episodios Nacionales, Fortunata y Jacinta, and El Doctor Centeno, and those penned by Eduardo Mendoza including La Ciudad de los Prodigios, El Laberinto de las Aceitunas, and La Isla Inaudita. I am also an avid aficionado of numismatics (coin collecting), and political artifacts, including a type of satirical medal termed “Bryan Money” which closely resembles a nineteenth-century United States silver dollar of the type which I collect and was made to ridicule the free silver movement of presidential aspirant William Jennings Bryan. I find that such items are as close as possible to a permanent bas-relief engraving of historical persons and events such as Napoleon, Maximilian or the Franco-Prussian War and the United States Presidential election of 1896. It is inevitable that the study of coins leads me into a discussion of some historical point. My Spanish friends , however might take offense were I, upon admiring the face of José Napoleon Bonaparte on a 20 Reales coin, to casually remark that "Pepe Botella" Napoleon's older brother, was a much more enlightened ruler than Fernando VII!                                           

Bryan Money: “One Dam”, 1896

Napoleonic Occupation of Barcelona :   5 Pesetas, 1812

                                  

Another rather esoteric divergence of my hobbies has been collecting political items from every U.S. national and state election since 1896 My specialty consists of Eisenhower items!

           Who says that Africa begins at the Pyrenees?