Author Forum Will Welcome

Professor Barbara Mujica

FAIRFIELD — Dr Barbara Mujica, Georgetown University professor of Spanish and noted author, will visit Fairfield University on Friday, October 12, for an Author’s Forum reading and book signing of her recently published and widely acclaimed historical novel, Sister Teresa, which explores the many facets of the controversial Saint Teresa of Avila.

The event will be at 3 pm in the DiMenna-Nyselius Library multi-media room, and the public is welcome. Tickets are $10 general admission (free for students and faculty).

Reverend Jeffrey von Arx, President of Fairfield University as well as a colleague and friend of Dr Mujica from his days at Georgetown, commented recently that the book “is a joy to read!” The author brings her customary “imaginative touches and playful creativity. But make no mistake! This is also a work of deep crudition, though lightly worn, from a literary scholar peerless in the field of Golden Age Spain.”

It is known that the young Teresa was wealthy, beautiful, spoiled and adored. Perhaps less known qualities of the saint were her voracious appetite for life, her innate ability to charm people, her political shrewdness, her rich sense of humor, her vast intelligence and an energy combined with a determination that enabled her to buck the hierarchy of the Church, reform the Carmelite Order of nuns, found 17 convents for women and many more monasteries for men, and survive the Spanish Inquisition with a secret heritage as a Jewish convert to Catholicism.

Dr Mujica’s painstaking research enabled her to blend fact with fiction in vivid detail, while, as Entertainment Weekly noted in its review, “eschewing sacred sentiment for rich, gritty anecdotes” and ably “reimagines famed 16th Century Teresa of Avila as a vibrant and fully fleshed woman not above vanity, deceit, and a little pre-convent hanky-panky.”

For more information, contact Elizabeth Hastings at 203-254-4307 or by e-mail at EHastings@mail.fairfield.edu.