B.A., Universidad de Valladolid, 2003

Ph.D., The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, 2010

My research and teaching focus on the cultural and literary histories of the early modern Iberian world, with a special emphasis on the global dimensions of cultural production and circulation in the period. My first line of work deals with the literary practices of the imperial popular soldiery, an often forgotten social group that traveled all around the early modern world and engaged in the production, consumption, and exchange of a large and varied corpus of writing. My second line of research is concerned with cultural controversy and struggle over certain writers and literary products in a context of national and imperial conflict. I have thus worked on topics such as competing Spanish and English translations of Camões’Os Lusíadas, the problematic imitation of Góngora by Portuguese authors during the Restoration War, and the reception of Quevedo’s colonial satires. My work has appeared in Hispanic Review, Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Voz y letra.

Currently, I am working on my first book, which explores the relation between military culture and the writing and reading of Renaissance epic poetry by plebeian and hidalgo soldiers in a context of constant imperial war. I am also completing two essays, one on the Spanish book industry and international trade in sixteenth-century Antwerp, and one on the tensions between nation and empire in early modern Iberian discourse on language.

During 2011-2012 I will teach a graduate seminar on a topic related to my book project, which will focus on eyewitness accounts of imperial war and violence (SPAN 32400), as well as an undergraduate course on urban and courtly poetry of the Spanish Golden Age (SPAN 25400). I am also very excited about teaching a course on ancient epic poetry in The Core (Readings in World Literatures I). I am absolutely delighted to be joining the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the University of Chicago this year.