The Diplomat
The director of the Instituto Cervantes , Luis García Montero, has appointed the new directors of the institution’s centers in Cairo, Naples and Tunis.
The three people have been chosen for their respective positions after a selection process of public call, at the proposal of the general secretary of the Cervantes, Carmen Noguero, and with the agreement of the Secretary of State for International Cooperation and president of the Board of Directors, Pilar Cancela, as reported by the institution of cultural diplomacy and published this week in the Official State Gazette (BOE).
The director in Cairo will be José Manual Alba Pastor, born in Madrid in 1966 and a graduate in Semitic philology, specializing in Arabic and Islam, from the Complutense University of Madrid. Since 1997 he has been head of studies at the Cervantes Institutes in Brussels, Athens, Utrecht, Brussels, Naples and, so far, Tel Aviv. He is also a specialist in methodological innovation and renovation of the administrative processes of the DELE exams (Diplomas in Spanish as a Foreign Language). Cervantes has two centers in Egypt, one in Cairo and one in Alexandria. The Cervantes center in Cairo was established in 1993 and collaborates with Egyptian, Spanish and Latin American museums, galleries, theaters, publishing houses and other cultural institutions to promote Spanish language and culture.
The Naples center will be directed by Ana Navarro Ortega, born in Almeria in 1971, with a degree in Humanities, a master’s degree in Archaeology and Heritage and a PhD in Social Sciences. Since 2002 she has been a career civil servant of the Junta de Andalucía as a museum curator and has been director of the Museum of Almería (2005-2013) and the Archaeological Museum of Seville (2013-2018). Currently on leave of absence, she has been living in Italy for several years and has worked as a cultural manager and independent researcher. She has taught at the Universitá La Sapienza and the Scuola Normale Superiore di la Universitá di Pisa (Italy), International Burch University (Serbia), Ghent University (Brussels) and at the universities of Granada, Cádiz and Almería, among others. The Instituto Cervantes in Naples is one of the four Cervantes centers in Italy, along with those in Rome, Milan and Palermo.
In addition, Germinal Gil de Gracia will be in charge of the center in Tunisia. Born in Madrid in 1971, holds a degree in English Philology from the University of Seville, a diploma in French language from the Institute of Languages of the University of Seville and a master’s degree in International Relations in the areas of the Mediterranean, the Arab World and Latin America. Much of his professional career has been spent at the Fundación Tres Culturas del Mediterráneo, where he has been responsible for and coordinated projects, including the Observatory for Migration and the Promotion of Intercultural Dialogue and the World Congress on Middle Eastern and North African Studies (WOCMES). Apart from teaching Spanish and its educational activities, the Instituto Cervantes in Tunis has a library that, with its 16,000 volumes, is a fundamental reference for Tunisian Hispanism.
The Instituto Cervantes is the public institution created by Spain in 1991 for the promotion and teaching of the Spanish language and co-official languages and for the dissemination of Spanish and Latin American culture. It is present in 86 cities in 45 countries on five continents. In addition, it has two offices in Spain, the central headquarters in Madrid and the Alcalá de Henares headquarters, and, within its multimedia platform, a reference portal on the Internet on the Spanish language and culture in Spanish: the Cervantes Virtual Center.
