Who is Ariel Castro?

Answer 1

José Ariel Castro is a Brazilian professor and was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1937. He graduated in Modern Languages (1959) and completed his formal post-graduation studies at the level of specialization, master degree and PhD in Portuguese language at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro - UFRJ (1968-1974). For his PhD he attended also at the same time several courses under the guidance of the Emeritus Professor Kurt Baldinger at the Neuphilologische Fakultät of the University of Heidelberg, where Baldinger had been the last Rektor. Later on he accomplished a post-doctorate in Linguistic Geography and Historical Linguistics granted by the German Foundation Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung at the same University (1976-1978). After obtaining in the UFRJ the degree of "Livre Docente" (1977), a traditional academic title which qualifies a teacher to work on a rank above the Associate Professor, he became Full Professor of Romanve Philology in its Faculty of Letters (1981) with special attention to the relation between History and language practice and development. He is now a pensionated professor at the UFRJ. As a researcher, the author has tried to find the historical meaning of documents from medieval Portugal to the time of the discovery of Brazil and the following colonial period, revealing unedited life and work details of historical, cultural or literary personages like the troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, the Portuguese king Afonso Henriques and his children, the Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvares Cabral and his notary Pero Vaz de Caminha, the jesuit José de Anchieta, the navigator Amerigo Vespucci and others. As a historian, he is a researcher that does everything with documents he analyses and is a frequent consultant to the main European and Brazilian libraries besides the use of his own large private library. Typical of this kind of work are his essays on the Brazilian language, officially Portuguese, and culture: Fundamentos da história externa do português do Brasil, Língua, sociedade e cultura no Brasil, Formação e desenvolvimento da língua nacional brasileira, Ação dos jesuítas no processo de formação cultural do Brasil, O movimento academicista e o processo cultural do Brasil colônia, Literatura e sociedade no Brasil joanino. He was visiting professor for courses and/or conferences in the universities of Berlin, Mainz, Heidelberg, Venice, Cagliari, Padova and Pavia. Ariel Castro has a Homepage, Ariel Castro's Corner since June 22, 1996, where he displays many examples of what he has researched and written in the fields o Linguistics, Philology, Literature and History, regarding Brazil, Portugal, France and Western Europe in general.