Miguel Martínez

Professor of Spanish Literature and the College
martinezm@uchicago.edu
Classics 118 (On leave Autumn 2023)
773.834.0429
PhD, CUNY-Graduate Center, 2010

My research and teaching focus on the cultural and literary histories of early modern Spain, colonial Latin America, and the Philippines. I am interested in topics such as war writing, popular culture, premodern revolt, book history, and autobiography. In addition to these topics, I teach courses on Golden Age poetry, the picaresque, the Inquisition, and modern Iberian literatures and cultures.

My first book, Front Lines. Soldiers’ Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World  (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), explored the writing and reading practices of the Spanish popular soldiery in the Old and the New Worlds. My second book, Comuneros. El rayo y la semilla, 1520-1521  (Hoja de Lata, 2021), is a new history of Castile’s Comunero uprising in 1520 and its modern intellectual and political legacies. I am also the author of a critical edition of Catalina de Erauso’s Vida y sucesos de la Monja Alférez  (Clásicos Castalia, 2021) that proposes a thorough rereading of the text by bringing together philology, autobiography studies, and trans history. With Albert Lloret, I also co-edited a special issue of Calíope (Fall 2018) on poetry and materiality.

I am currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Third New World. Manila’s Literary Culture and the Global Baroque, which studies the literary practices of both Manila’s colonial elites and the city’s multiracial third estate as conflicting Baroque vernaculars that brought together, in productive tension, the global and the local. With Antonio Castillo Gómez I am also co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Early Modern Studies on “Subaltern Writing and Popular Memory in the Early Modern World.”

These research projects have coexisted, in the last few years, with a growing interest in public history and the public humanities. I have regularly written for non-academic audiences in Spanish media and I am a co-founder and collaborator of Historia Pública, the Spanish association of public history.

 

Select Articles and Book Chapters

“Ficciones genealógicas. El morisco Román Ramírez y los libros de caballerías.” In Sangre y leche. Raza y religión en el mundo hispánico moderno. Ed. Mercedes García Arenal and Felipe Pereda. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2021, 437-459.

“Theater and Society in Colonial Manila.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 55.1 (2021): 89-115.

“Narrating Mutiny in the Army of Flanders. Cristóbal Rodríguez Alva’s La inquieta Flandes (1594).” Early Modern War Narratives and the Revolt in the Low Countries. Ed. Raymond Fagel, Leonor Álvarez Francés, and Beatriz Santiago Belmonte. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. 89-107.

“Manila’s Sangleyes, the Parián, and a Chinese Wedding (1625).” The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815: A Reader of Primary Sources. Ed. Christina Lee and Ricardo Padrón. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 73-89.

“Vidas de soldados. La escritura amotinada”. Vidas en armas. Ed. Adrián Sáez and Luis Gómez Canseco. Huelva: Universidad de Huelva, 2019. 87-101.

“Popular Balladry in Colonial America.” In The Rise of Spanish American Poetry, 1500-1700: Literary and Cultural Transmission in the New World. Ed. Rodrigo Cacho Casal and Imogen Choi. Oxford: Legenda, 2019. 101-116.

“Góngora asiático. Notas sobre poesía filipina inédita del primer Barroco.” Docta y Sabia Atenea. Studia in honorem Lía Schwartz. Ed. Sagrario López Poza, Nieves Pena Sueiro, Mariano de la Campa, Isabel Pérez Cuenca, Susan Byrne y Almudena Vidorreta. Coruña: Universidade da Coruña, 2019. 473-90.

“Poesía y materialidad. Introducción,” co-authored with Albert Lloret, Poesía y materialidad, special issue of Calíope 23.2 (Fall 2018): 7-19.

“Writing on the Edge. The Poet, the Printer, and the Colonial Frontier in Ercilla’s La Araucana (1569-1590),” Colonial Latin American Review 27.2 (2017): 132-53.

“Don Quijote, Manila, 1623. Orden colonial y cultura popular.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 70.2 (2017): 27-43.

 

Public Scholarship

“El programa político comunero”. Desperta Ferro. Arqueología e Historia Moderna 51 (April 2021), 38-44.

Memoria comunera.” CTXT. Revista Contexto, 23 April, 2020.

“La larga resaca posimperial.” Política Exterior, November/December, 2019. 146-51.

Colón en Nuremberg.” CTXT. Revista Contexto, 12 October, 2019.

Una tradición rebelde: costumbres en común.” La Marea. Apuntes de clase, 19 September, 2019.

“De mí mismo nací. El verso y la vida de Lope de Vega.” CTXT. Revista Contexto, 20 March 2019.

“El porqué de la picaresca.” Desperta Ferro. Arqueología e Historia Moderna 20 (August 2018), 12-19.

#Cervantes2018. Los clásicos en la plaza de Twitter. CTXT. Revista Contexto, 30 June, 2018.

El pasado inacabado. Sobre La peste.” CTXT. Revista Contexto, 23 January, 2018.

 

Recent Awards and Honors

NEH long-term fellow. Newberry Library. Chicago, winter to autumn 2023.

Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. University of Chicago, 2020.

Franke Fellowship, Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago. October 2018-June 2019.

Mendel Fellowship, Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington. August-October 2018.

Neubauer Faculty Development Fellowship in the College, for excellence in undergraduate teaching. 2017-2018.

 

Recent Courses in RLL

  • SPAN 21310/31310 Golden Age Poetry. Theory and Practice of Lyric Reading (Autumn 2021)
  • SPAN 21805 Iberian Literatures and Cultures. Modern and Contemporary (Winter 2017, Autumn 2017, Autumn 2019, Spring 2021)
  • SPAN 23025/33025 Vidas infames. Sujetos heterodoxos en el mundo hispánico (1500-1800) (Spring 2021)
  • SPAN 24170/34170 El arte de sobrevivir: la tradición picaresca (Winter 2020)
  • SPAN 31800 Culturas populares en el mundo ibérico (siglos XVI-XVII) (Winter 2017, Spring 2024)
  • SPAN 38800 Problemas críticos y teóricos en el estudio de las culturas ibéricas y latinoamericanas (Autumn 2019, Winter 2022, Spring 2024)
  • SPAN 40017 From Baroque to Neo-Baroque (Autumn 2017)

 

 

Affiliated Departments and Centers: Center for Latin American Studies