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, and it has been translated into Spanish as Las líneas del frente. La escritura de los soldados en la Edad Moderna (trans. Ana Useros, Madrid: Akal, 2024). 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 “Poesía y materialidad,” and with Antonio Castillo Gómez I coordinated a volume of the Journal of Early Modern Studies (2024) on “Subaltern Writing and Popular Memory in the Early Modern World.”
I am currently working on a book project tentatively titled The Sunken City. Literature and Urban Culture in Colonial Manila, which studies the literary practices of the city’s colonial elites and its multiracial third estate in relation to the peculiar social formation that emerged entangled with the political economy of the Transpacific trade. Other recent and ongoing work has dealt with topics such as the poetry of the Morisco diaspora, the role of artisans in the production of Iberian Renaissance theater, and the intellectual legacies of Ángel Rama and José Antonio Maravall. These research projects have coexisted, in the last few years, with a growing interest in public history and the public humanities, and I have regularly written for non-academic audiences in Spanish.
Select Articles and Book Chapters
“La noche de los artesanos. Trabajo manual y producción dramática en el Renacimiento ibérico.” Hispanic Review. Special Issue on “Marxism and the Premodern Archive,” ed. Noel Blanco Mourelle. Forthcoming 2025.
“La obstinada presencia del pasado”. Prologue to Ángel Rama, La ciudad letrada. Un ensayo, ed. Amparo Rama. Montevideo: Estuario Editora, 2024.
“La poesía hispanofilipina del siglo XVII.” Historia de la literatura hispanofilipina, ed. Rocío Ortuño and Jorge Mojarro. Routledge, 2024. 64-75.
“Ángel Rama contra la ciudad letrada. Prehistoria de un concepto.” Latin American Research Review 59.3 (2024), 535-552.
“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.
“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.
“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
“¿Qué fue la batalla cultural? La tradición obrera en la sociedad de masas.” La Marea, 9 September, 2022
“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.
“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.
Publications
