Monique J. Lemaître Leon, who retired from NIU in 2004 after 20 years as a professor of Latin American language and literature, died Nov. 5 in Pittsburgh. She was 81.
According to the Summer 2004 edition of Encuentros, a newsletter of the NIU Center for Latino and Latin American Studies, Lemaître focused her scholarly work on “a variety of canonical writers of Latin America,” including Roberto Fernández Retamar, Ángelos Mastretta, Isabel Allende, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges.
Her first book, a revision of her 1974 dissertation written at the University of Pittsburgh, analyzed “the poetic praxis and theory of (Octavio) Paz’s work, uncovering the various cultural, spiritual and geographic characteristics of his poetry and contextualized Paz within the literary movements of the 20th century.”
She also examined women’s liberation in Latin America and social activism.