My research centers on early modern Spanish fiction and its engagement with its aesthetic, social, philosophical and global contexts. Much of my published and ongoing work examines various levels of interplay between convention and transgression in the writings of Miguel de Cervantes, as well as exploring the relationship between visual and verbal experience in early modern fiction. I am particularly interested in how the literary form of the novel is developed by early modern authors as a discursive space in which to explore and transgress aesthetic and social conventions of representation and interpretation. This broad topic has led to a variety of specific research projects, including studies of visual and verbal representation and interpretation in Don Quijote, the translation of Cervantes’s critical aesthetic to seventeenth century England and eighteenth century Spain, and analyses of Cervantes’s disruption of conventional representations of affect and humor.
I am at work on the early stages of a book-length project on the figure of the labyrinth and the experience of wonder in the Hispanic baroque. Tentatively titled Structures of Wonder: Transatlantic Reappropriations of the Classical Labyrinth in the Hispanic Baroque, explores the reappropriation of the classical labyrinth in works produced on both sides of the Atlantic (Mateo Alemán, Miguel de Cervantes, María de Zayas, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz), identifying the recuperation of the labyrinth, both as metaphor and as structural model, as a contestatory strategy aimed at subverting the very dominant cultural paradigms to which classical culture gave rise in the early modern period. This interdisciplinary and comparative study contributes to current views on the aesthetics and politics of the Hispanic baroque in its transatlantic context, identifying in particular the points of continuity and rupture that mark both the Iberian and the American response to the dissemination and imposition of European renaissance culture.
Other recent scholarship includes conference presentations on the representation of monstrosity in Isidore of Seville’s Eytmologiae and Columbus’s Diario de abordo, and a study of gendered vengeance in Vélez de Guevara’s La serrana de la Vera.
In addition to my individual research, I am a member of the international research group Grupo de Estudios Cervantinos (GREC), in which I contribute to the project “Recepción e interpretación del Quijote (1605-1830)”.
Examples of my scholarly work can be found here, here and here, and in my chapter on “Love and the Laws of Literature: The Ethics and Poetics of Affect in Cervantes’s ‘The Little Gypsy Girl'” included in the book Goodbye Eros: Recasting Forms and Norms of Love in the Age of Cervantes (Toronto University Press, 2020).