Guillermo Toscano y García

Guillermo Toscano y García holds a Bachelor's degree in Arts (UBA), a Master's degree in Hispanic Philology (CSIC) and a PhD in Arts with a specialisation in Linguistics (UBA). He has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses at Argentine universities; he was also a visiting professor at the University of Leipzig (Germany), a visiting lecturer at the University of Kraków (Poland) and currently serves as a professor of Linguistics at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires. His area of specialisation is linguistic historiography, particularly the history of linguistics in Argentina and South America during the 19th and 20th centuries. He founded and has edited the Revista argentina de historiografía lingüística (RAHL) since 2009.

The project

Title: Ángel Rosenblat in Paris (1937–1938): scientific networks, forced displacement, and an intellectual laboratory for Hispanic philology.

"Ángel Rosenblat (Poland, 1902–Venezuela, 1984) was one of the most influential linguists and philologists of the twentieth century in the Hispanic world, known for his work at the Instituto de Filología of the University of Buenos Aires, his participation in the Centro de Estudios Históricos in Madrid, and his decisive contribution to the development of linguistic studies in Venezuela. As a Jewish migrant and political refugee–persecuted first in Argentina during the military coup, then in Nazi Germany and later in war-torn Spain–his early trajectory is also the story of an intellectual whose networks, movements, and scientific collaborations were deeply shaped by the major political and social conflicts of the 1930s.

Within this trajectory, his stay in Paris between 1937 and 1938 occupies a strategic position. It was a short but intense period during which Rosenblat, stripped of his Argentine citizenship and rendered stateless, found in France not only temporary refuge but also a space of intellectual reconfiguration. Thanks to the support of Paul Rivet and the access to institutions such as the Société des Américanistes, the Institut d’Ethnologie, the Musée de l’Homme, the Faculté des Lettres de Paris, and the Institut d’Études Hispaniques, he was able to enter transnational scientific networks, advance ongoing research, and become involved in ethnology and Americanist studies—fields that would decisively shape his later thinking. In this sense, Paris functioned as an intellectual laboratory in which his disciplinary reorientation took shape, a space that enabled both professional continuity and conceptual renewal. His correspondence with fellow philologist and linguist Amado Alonso (1896–1952)–preserved at Harvard University–offers uniquely rich insight into this process.

Despite its importance, this period remains virtually unknown and has not yet been reconstructed through French archival documentation. This project proposes a systematic investigation of Rosenblat’s Parisian experience through direct consultation of the archives that contain traces of his activities, thereby reconstructing a key chapter in the transatlantic circulation of linguistic knowledge. This research also constitutes a specific component of a broader project I am conducting on Rosenblat’s early trajectory and his transnational networks between Europe and Latin America."

Hosting institution: The laboratoire d'histoire des théories linguistiques of the University Paris Cité

Selective Bibliography

• Guillermo Toscano y García & Esteban Lidgett (dirs.). 2026. Bibliografía de la gramática escolar argentina. Buenos Aires: Editorial de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras.
• Sinner, Carsten & Guillermo Toscano y García (eds.). 2026. Ideas (lingüísticas) que cruzan el mar. Intercambios científicos entre los ámbitos germanohablante e iberoamericano. Buenos Aires: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras.
• Ennis, Juan Antonio & Guillermo Toscano y García. 2022. El loco de la lengua. Los textos de Arturo Costa Álvarez sobre filología y lingüística. Buenos Aires: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Buenos Aires.
• Toscano y García, Guillermo & Juan Antonio Ennis. 2026. “Traditions of linguistics: South America”. International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd Edition. In History of Linguistics, ed. by Toon van Hal. Elsevier.
• Toscano y García, Guillermo. 2022. “Revisita del problema argentino de la lengua. Amado Alonso y la historia de una reescritura”. Lexis. Revista de lingüística y literatura. XLVI: 1. 243-280.