I work on early modern Spanish literature and premodern critical disability studies, with particular emphasis on how texts, institutions, and performance practices shaped and contested disabling social processes. My current research examines how regimes of bodily normativity were institutionalized and enforced in early modern Iberia, especially through law and administrative practice, the regulation of officeholding, and expectations governing the embodied performance of political authority. I also study how early modern Spanish literature represented bodily difference and how theatrical practice translated that difference into performance and regulated its visibility, particularly through dramatic form, casting, and staging.
These questions form the basis of my book manuscript, Unfit for Office: Divergent Bodies and the Embodiment of Authority in Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture. The book examines how Habsburg administrative institutions and early modern Spanish literary culture linked bodily appearance both to fitness for public office and to the exercise of political authority. Research for the project has received support from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Huntington Library.
A distinct research project, developed across several articles, examines Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s comedia Las paredes oyen across its textual and performance histories. It traces how the play’s male protagonist, marked by bodily difference in the text, was staged as bodily normative in seventeenth-century performance and how his embodiment was reconfigured in later productions. One of these articles, “The Ethics of Staging Crip Comedia,” uses the play as a case study to examine the broader ethical questions raised by staging disability in contemporary productions of early modern drama. The article received the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater’s Matthew Stroud Comedia Article Prize in 2025.
Another major strand of my research focuses on disability, colonialism, and systems of care in the colonial Andes. My second book project, tentatively titled Utopias of Inclusion: Colonial Charity and Indigenous Contestation in the Viceroyalty of Peru, brings disability studies into conversation with decolonial scholarship. The project argues that Spanish colonial authorities, particularly under Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, sought to displace Andean forms of communal inclusion with a hospital-based model of Christian charity, thereby making disabled and impoverished Indigenous people increasingly dependent on colonial institutions.
At the University of Chicago, I teach Spanish language at all levels, as well as courses in Iberian literature and culture from the medieval period to the present. My upper-level courses include classes on disability in early modern Spanish literature and on medical discourse, caregiving, and healing in early modern Spanish literature. I also teach in the College’s Core curriculum, including Western Mediterranean Civilization in Barcelona. Before joining the University of Chicago, I taught at Cornell University and Colby College.
I was raised in Andújar, a town in the province of Jaén in Andalucía, Spain. I hold a PhD and an MA in Romance Studies from Cornell University, an MA in Spanish Literature from the University of Delaware, and a BA in English Philology from the Universidad de Granada.
Select Articles and Book Chapters
“Disability and Legal Function in Early Modern Spanish Law.” The Oxford Handbook of Disability and Literatures in English: 1500–1700. Edited by Elizabeth B. Bearden and Katherine Schaap Williams, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
“Permissible Embodiments: A Performance History of Disability in Ruiz de Alarcón’s Las paredes oyen.” Bulletin of the Comediantes, vol. 77, no. 1, 2026, pp. 69–103.
“Heavy Debates: Weighing Fatness in a Spanish Renaissance Dialogue.” Fat Bodies in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Christine Ott, Holly Fletcher, and Jill Burke, Routledge, 2026, pp. 143–159.
“Cervantine Staring: Cervantes’s Self-Portrait and the Visual Construction of Maritornes’s Deviant Body.” Cervantine Futures: Theorizing Cervantes after the Critical Turn. Edited by Nicholas R. Jones and Paul Michael Johnson, Vanderbilt University Press, 2026, pp. 106-116.
“The Ethics of Staging Crip Comedia.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, vol. 27, 2023, pp. 147–165. https://doi.org/10.1353/hcs.2024.a920069
“The Unstageable Birth of the Crip Galán: Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s Las paredes oyen.” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, vol. 77, no. 2, 2023, pp. 72–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/00397709.2023.2200098
“Irrepresentable Corporealities: The Staging of Las paredes oyen in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” Comedia Performance, vol. 19, 2022, pp. 40–59. https://doi.org/10.5325/COMEPERF.19.1.0040
“The Weight of Authority: Sancho’s Fat Body in Barataria (2.45).” Don Quijote, by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Burton Raffel and edited by Diana de Armas Wilson, W. W. Norton & Company, 2020, pp. 797–805.
“The Optics of Bodily Deviance: Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s Path to Public Office.” Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture. Edited by Maja Bondestam, Amsterdam University Press, 2020, pp. 85–102. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048552375-005
Recent Awards and Honors
- Matthew Stroud Comedia Article Prize, Association for Hispanic Classical Theater, August 2025, for “The Ethics of Staging Crip Comedia.”
- Folger Institute Micro Fellowship, Folger Shakespeare Library, January 2025.
- Travel Grant for Study Abroad, Huntington Library, March 2023.
- Hanson Lee Dulin Fellowship, Folger Shakespeare Library, March 2022.
- Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellowship, Renaissance Society of America, January 2022.
Recent Courses in RLL
- SPAN 10100 Beginning Elementary Spanish I (Autumn 2022, Autumn 2025)
- SPAN 10300 Beginning Elementary Spanish III (Spring 2023)
- SPAN 20100 Language, History, and Culture I (Winter 2023, Spring 2023, Winter 2024)
- SPAN 20402 Curso de redacción para hablantes nativos (Autumn 2023)
- SPAN 21705 Iberian Literatures and Cultures: Medieval and Early Modern (Spring 2026)
- SPAN 21805 Iberian Literatures and Cultures: Modern and Contemporary (Autumn 2022, Autumn 2023, Spring 2024)
- SPAN 28700 Monsters and Misfits: Disability in Early Modern Spanish Literature (Spring 2024)
- SPAN 28777 Disease, Caregiving, and Healing: Medical Discourse and Practice in Early Modern Spanish Literature (Spring 2026)