Two professors elected to Royal Spanish Academy

Jerry Craddock and Charles Faulhaber, both professors emeriti of Spanish and former chairs of UC Berkeley’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese, have been elected to join 100 scholars and researchers as foreign corresponding members of the Royal Spanish Academy, or Real Academia Española.

The official seal of the Real Academia Española (Image courtesy of the Real Academia Española)

Craddock was chosen based on his decades of research on the history of the Spanish language and legal works of King Alfonso the Learned of Castile and Leon. After retiring, Craddock launched the Cibola Project to digitally edit documentary sources relating to the Spanish exploration and settlement of the southwestern United States.

Faulhaber, former director of UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, was named to the academy for his work on medieval Spanish literature and its manuscript sources, particularly the PhiloBiblon project. PhiloBiblon is a catalog of primary sources in manuscript and printed form for the study of medieval Iberian culture.

The Royal Spanish Academy’s purpose is to guard the purity of the Spanish language. It publishes an official dictionary in collaboration with sister academies from Spanish-speaking countries around the world. It also publishes an official grammar of Spanish and maintains two databases containing hundreds of millions of words for research use.