When I was leaving Champaign, a colleague in the English Department, offered this prediction: “Pepe when you get to the end of your life, consider yourself lucky if you can count your truly close friends on the fingers of one hand. If you get to the second, you will be truly blessed". At his death, Ivan had a plethora of friends, and admirers. He was a Mensch, an honorable, sensitive and kind person.

I had the privilege of knowing Ivan many decades. I have been re-living many of our visits, conversations, walks, classes together. I am certain that all of you are going through the same process. As I recall moments shared, I feel diminished knowing that Ivan cannot answer a phone call, an e-mail. I can see Ivan's smile, full of meanings, his tilt of the head as he was gently making a point.

Ivan was a consummate professional; that is well known. He was also a devoted and loving husband and father, a great colleague. My hand is mourning for a lost finger.

In1963, Latin American Studies were in their nascent stages. I was about to defend my Doctoral Dissertation at the University of Illinois. My director was Luis Leal, the eminent Mexican scholar, and I was his first pupil to major in Latin American Literature.

I had a number of job offers, but the one I chose was the position at Washington University in St. Louis. My choice was made easy by the fact that Ivan Schulman called and said he wanted me to be an integral part of a blossoming department. He had just been awarded two large Ford Grants, that allowed him to bring to the school seven professors of different disciplines, but all Latin Americanist. I was also allowed to teach courses in Italian and, when needed, French, two fields I studied at Illinois.

From the beginning Ivan became my mentor. He read all my articles and offered comments. He was a most generous and human colleague. I learned from him to be a close reader of the text. Theory helped but it never became the main focus.

Since we were beginning to venture in a new field, I was given the opportunity to develop my own courses. Modernismo was his specialty, but I could create courses in other disciplines. These were courses with texts I never studied at Illinois, and soon I started teaching survey courses, heading the Italian section, and teaching graduate courses and seminars in various disciplines. Ivan supported me and taught me to be a serious scholar, teacher and administrator.

I shall never forget his generosity and support. He made me what I later became, not a star but a good and productive scholar, teacher and administrator. We kept in touch and when I learned he died I knew I had lost a friend and a great influence in my career. I shall always miss him.

I met Ivan Schulman in St. Augustine in connection with a graduate class at Florida State University at the beginning of my studies of the works of José Martí. Later he visited our class in Tallahassee and offered counsel about our term paper ideas. Mine were half baked at that point and he wisely suggested that I discard most of them and think more deeply about one or two that remained, advice so helpful that I would give it to my own students in the years that followed.

One of those ideas became a paper I presented at an academic conference, at which he was seated in the front row, making me just a bit more nervous, but grateful for his silent support. We met again at an international conference in Cuba where it became evident to me just how important he was in the field of Martí Studies. I would have been much more nervous about the first paper of mine he listened to had I understood the magnitude of his reputation.

My academic adviser and mentor, José Gomariz had studied under Ivan, so when a graduate school colleague and I later studied at the Centro de Estudios Martianos in Havana we were referred to as Ivan’s academic grandchildren, a moniker we both wore proudly.

I had the pleasure of working with Ivan Schulman at the University of Florida when he served as director of the Center for Latin American Studies in 1977-80. I was his associate director.

The Center is a university-wide unit with affiliate faculty and Latin American-related courses in departments and colleges across the campus. It's director reports to the provost and is a member of the council of deans and directors. In addition to affiliate faculty, the Center has its own tenure-accruing faculty lines and offers an inter-disciplinary MA as well as undergraduate and graduate certificates in Latin American Studies, and it develops, secures private and public funding and manages multi-disciplinary research projects focused on Latin America. It cultivates and manages linkages with Latin American universities and research institutes and hosts visiting faculty. The University of Florida center was an original recipient of National Resource Center and fellowship funding, and it has maintained its standing for this highly competitive source of Federal funding.

Although Ivan was recruited to UF for his prominence as Martí scholar, he not only agreed to step in as the center director, he embraced the opportunity and proved very effective in managing and advancing the center's challenging portfolio. By assuming the directorship, he freed up the funding to hire junior faculty members.

Ivan Schulman made significant contributions to the University of Florida in his scholarly research and publications, mentoring graduate students and directing the Center for Latin American Studies. His administrative and leadership skills stood him is good stead when he was subsequently called on to serve as department chair at Wayne State University and the University of Illinois.

First, I want to thank Jose Gomariz for helping to create a space to honor Ivan Schulman. Jose and I met in Cuba during the May 1995 commemorations of Marti's death on May 19, 1895; delegates from around the world gathered at Dos Rios and in Santiago. Since then Jose and I have met at conferences over the years, and we were both at the annual awards held at Casa de las Americas in January 2000. Following the Casa ceremony, I accompanied the student group Jose was leading to Trinidad and was able to appreciate his dedication to making Marti's importance relevant to students. I treasure Jose's friendship and am grateful for his scholarship which I have read and cited over the decades.

Anne Fountain

An inspiring professor who inspired many!

We remember Ivan Schulman as esteemed colleague in the NEH Institute "The Americas of Jose Marti" held at the University of South Florida in summer 2002. The idea for an NEH seminar or institute about Marti had been proposed by Anne when she taught at a small liberal arts college in North Carolina, but Mike's campus, USF in Tampa, turned out to be the perfect venue. After Mike contacted Ivan about being a co-director, their work together in the Institute framed our friendship. Our memories oflvan include shared meals, conversations, consultations, and a camaraderie that went far beyond the Institute activities.

Ivan as co-Director was indispensable for the Institute. He inspired intense interest and applications and motivated the participants. While most tributes to him will focus on the impact of books and articles and his ties to Cuba, we want to honor his legacy by highlighting the prominence of two from the USF Institute who have helped to make Jose Marti, and by extension Ivan's contributions to Marti studies, more widely known. Esther Allen who gave a guest lecture on Marti and translations and James Lopez, a stellar institute participant, have brought Marti's life and works to a broad public as well as scholars.

Esther Allen, a professor at Baruch College and in the Ph.D. Programs in French and in Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures_at City University of New York Graduate Center, is author of the best and most available translation of Marti's works into English, Selected Writngs, Penguin, 2002. She has published articles and books chapters on Marti and is writing book about his life and afterlife. In 2017 she organized a Jose Marti Weekend (October 14-15) with a roster of distinguished speakers on Governor's Island in New York, a place Marti mentioned in his chronicles. The next year, she spearheaded an effort with the New York Writers Hall of Fame and the Empire State Center for the Book to have Jose Marti recognized as a New York State writer. The gala event in which Marti was inducted posthumously into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame on June 5, 2018 was a huge success that expanded knowledge about Marti to libraries and the public at large.

James Lopez a distinguished professor of Spanish at the University of Tampa serves as Co­ Director of the Center for Jose Marti Studies Affiliate, al link between the University of Tampa and the Centro de Estudios Martianos in Havana. Professor Lopez received the University of Tampa's Louise Loy Hunter Outstanding Faculty Member Award for 2018-19 and dedicated his December 2019 commencement address to how Marti could provide a guide for ethical living. In 2016 Professor Lopez co-directed the "Marti in Tampa: First International UT-USF Conference on Jose Marti" held in Tampa, Florida, April 14-16, with invited scholars who covered a wide range of approaches to the study of Jose Marti. Subsequently he won highly competitive NEH funding to offer a summer institute about Marti in 2019. The University of Tampa's 2019 summer Institute, "Jose Marti and the Immigrant Communities of Florida in Cuban Independence and the Dawn of the American Century," enjoyed extraordinary success. The 2019 Institute website at the University of Tampa features background information, power points, videos of presentations and a list of resources.

What Esther Allen and James Lopez have accomplished are impressive testaments to the legacy and influence of Ivan Schulman.

My first encounter with Ivan Schulman was seeing his name on the cover of a book we were discussing in class. The professor wanted us to consider not just the familiar narrative of Martí as Cuba´s national icon but the way he used words to create indelible images. Schulman's work was a way to get us there.

Years later, I struggled to write about the complex ways that eroticism figured in the work of Julián del Casal, a recurring if veiled topic in his work, often labelled by his critics as a Cuban copy of French “decadence”. At the time, the eighties and early nineties of the last century, there was very little, if anything, focusing on heterodox sexualities in the literature of the Spanish-speaking world. In academic conferences, there was outright derision for anyone broaching these topics and little theoretical material to do so in a scholarly setting. To include them in a course was for the untenured professor, as some advised, nothing less than “professional suicide”.

As I worked on the book, I found Schulman's work on Casal helpful on more than one occasion. When I published it, I sent him a copy and to my surprise, received a hand-written note. It said:

3 de febrero de 1994

Querido amigo Oscar,

Mil gracias por el envío de tu libro – y felicitaciones. El libro ha llegado en un momento muy oportuno, pues lo voy a utilizar en el seminario que estoy enseñando este semestre sobre los discursos modernistas en un mundo moderno.

Un abrazo de Ivan

Dear friend Oscar,

Many thanks for sending me your book – and congratulations. The book has arrived at a very opportune moment, for I am going to use it in the seminar that I am teaching this semester on modernistadiscourses in a modern world.

A hug from Ivan

The note came at just the right time for me; it lifted my spirits and encouraged me to go on with my work. I´ve used the note ever since as a bookmark in my copy of Ivan´s Cátedra edition of Martí's poetry, which was required reading in my classes on modernismo. Ivan is certainly missed; his legacy of scholarly work and uncommon human kindness is enduring.

The sad news about Ivan Schulman’s passing literally took my breath away. For me, Ivan was more than a department head, mentor, and role model; he was a friend. My children--who first met “Uncle Ivan” when they were young, still recall the sumptuous Thanksgiving feasts he and Evelyn Picon-Garfield prepared every November. To them, Ivan was like family at a moment when their nuclear family had been destabilized, and that made him even more endearing to me.

Some of my fondest memories of my thirteen years at UIUC include waking up in the wee hours of the morning when the house was quiet to prepare classes, finalize a funding proposal for my research, or write a request for university support to promote the Portuguese program. Several hours later, after dropping children off at their elementary school, I would pass by Ivan’s home and place the printed version of the proposal in his mailbox. When he returned from his early morning run, he would pick up the printed copy, attach his evaluation, and place the paperwork in my departmental mailbox by noon the same day. Ivan’s organizational style as an administrator resulted in a degree of departmental efficiency that captured not only the admiration of his colleagues but also that of college committee chairs and a series of deans who relied on those in positions like his to move the agenda of the college ahead.

While Ivan’s intellectual productivity is unquestionable, I was particularly appreciative of his inclusion of the Portuguese-speaking world in his vision of Iberian and Latin American cultures and literatures. Having bridged both sides of the Atlantic in my graduate studies in Spanish and Portuguese, I was then, and still am today, dismayed at the exclusion of Portugal and Brazil in the curriculum of Spanish and Portuguese departments throughout the US, even as cross-disciplinary teaching and research has become more prevalent. Ivan Schulman resisted this attitude as a scholar and administrator decades ago. When he hosted a group of Latin American scholars from the Soviet Union for a conference in the mid-1980s, he made sure to include Brazil in the program. When he contributed to the project of revamping the graduate program in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese at UIUC, he insisted that students in Spanish study Portuguese language and complete several courses in Brazilian literature and culture so that their formation would include a larger part of the Americas. Decades later, other prominent scholars would take up the project of Inter-American Literary Studies but it is important to acknowledge that this body of work owes much to the scholarship of Ivan Schulman and a small group of his contemporaries.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Ivan’s humanity. A New Yorker in the most wonderful of ways, his sense of humor contained a touch of sarcasm that was usually accompanied by a twinkle of the eye and a characteristic laugh. Yet, his ability to call things out never prevented him from helping, encouraging, and mentoring others, including an entire cadre of assistant professors working towards tenure during his term as department head. Ivan knew how to strike a balance between the demands of his job as a department head with his commitments in teaching and research while also privileging the needs of others and these were attributes I have always tried to emulate in my professional life.

Ivan Schulman’s mighty scholarly work will stand the test of time. A giant in the field, he was a tremendously important figure not only in his chosen field of studies but also in my own professional and personal life, and I will be forever grateful for his support, mentorship, and friendship throughout the years.

On a late night in the library as an undergraduate, exhausted, overcaffeinated, and about ready to turn in, I put my books down and went for a walk through the stacks to wake myself up. Walking down the aisles, I suddenly stopped. I had seen my last name on the binding of a book. I bent down and pulled the book out. It was my grandfather’s Painting Modernism. I sat down in the stacks and started reading. An hour went by when I remembered I had a paper to finish. I do not remember what the paper was on or even if I ended up finishing it that night. I do remember walking home though and thinking: “I want to do that. I want to do what grandpa does.”

This was not the first time I had mulled over the idea of going into academia. A number of my professors in undergrad had already inspired me in that direction. Haphazardly discovering my grandfather’s work in the library on a late night; however, somehow solidified this desire for me. Subsequentially, my grandfather would provide me with a wealth of advice and guidance that continued until he passed away. Still, he never told me what to do. He showed me his path into academia and encouraged me to use it as a guide. In Painting Modernism, I was struck by a line he quoted from John Berger: “Seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words.” This is how my grandfather taught me, by always first showing me the place he established for himself in the world and leaving it to me to write in the rest.

As a junior in college, I called my grandfather for advice on whether to apply to for graduate school in French literature or History. He responded in a lengthy email where he provided examples from his own experience. He explained how, at my age, he had to make a similar decision between taking a more historical or literary approach to his work. In his case, as he described it: “I chose Spanish for the MA and Latin American Literature for the Ph.D. By doing that I was able to choose courses and a dissertation that included social, linguistic, and historical concepts.” He did not tell me which to choose. Three years later, as a master’s student in History at Oxford applying for my PhD, I again called my grandfather for advice. I had narrowed down my final two choices to a French and a History program. In the last call I had with my grandfather, I asked him which program I should accept. He again refused to tell me in words what to do. He walked me through his own experiences showing me how he balanced his multidisciplinary interests. He even sent along his CV, so I could see exactly how he “worked things out.” He always guided me by example.

My grandfather passed away just as I was about to begin my PhD in History. While I will not be able to call him anymore to talk or to hear his advice, I will always be able to look at his life as a guide showing me how to establish my place in the world. And maybe one day, following in my grandfather’s footsteps, I will have a book next to his in the library that a sleep deprived, overcaffeinated undergraduate student will pull off the shelf for a late night read.