Ruth El Saffar
Ruth El Saffar was an American literary scholar born on June 12, 1941, in New York City. She specialized in the works of Miguel de Cervantes. She earned a BA in philosophy from Colorado College in 1962 and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1966, with a dissertation on Don Quixote supervised by Elias Rivers. She taught at the University of Baghdad, the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and the University of Illinois Chicago, where she became an associate professor in 1973.
El Saffar published several books on Cervantes, including Cervantes: Novel to Romance (1974), Distance and Control in Don Quixote (1975), Cervantes' El casamiento engañoso y el coloquio de los perros (1976), Beyond Fiction (1984), and Critical Essays on Cervantes (1986). She edited volumes such as Studies in Honor of Elias Rivers (1989) and Quixotic Desire (1993). In 1975 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on Spanish fiction. She served as president of the Cervantes Society of America and was active with the Modern Language Association.
In 1966 she married physicist Zuhair El Saffar; they had three children, including jazz musician Amir El Saffar. El Saffar died of cancer on March 28, 1994, in Zion, Illinois. Her final book, Rapture Encaged, was published posthumously; she dictated its introduction to her friend Diana de Armas Wilson. She was also a practicing Jungian analyst and received an honorary degree from Colorado College in 1987. A festschrift, Voces A Ti Debidas, was published in 1993 in her honor.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 07:11 (CET).