Biography
Throughout my research and teaching, I focus on the intersection of text, body, and power in narrative written at the height of Iberian expansion into Africa, Asia and the Americas, an approach that is methodologically informed by sociolinguistic and historicist approaches.
My book, A Grammar of the Dead: Necroepistemology in the Early Modern Mediterranean, forthcoming with Fordham University Press, examines the literary and epistemological role of the corpse in accounts of the battle of al-Qasr al-Kabir (1578). In it, I propose an approach to understanding how dead bodies anchored the construction of knowledge within early modern Mediterranean historiography. The eyewitness and the corpse cooperatively produce what I term necroepistemology: a system of knowledge grounded in or transmitted through first-hand experiences of the material dead. A Grammar of the Corpse argues that the presence of the corpse in historical narrative is not just incidental nor is it off-hand. Rather, it fills a central gap in testimonial narrative: it provides tangible evidence of the narrators reliability while simultaneously provoking a visceral, affective response to the disgusting presence of the dead. The use of corpses as a source of narrative authority mobilizes what cultural historians, philosophers, and social anthropologists have pointed to as the latent power of the dead for generating social and political meaning and knowledge.
As a teacher, I am keenly aware that many of my students have their doubts about either the utility or relevance of the early modern period to their twenty-first century world. I seek ways to draw connections between my classroom and the world outside of it, remembering the origins of my own interest in the history and literature of the pre-modern Iberian Peninsula in conversations about Islam and the West in a post-9/11 world. Recent bestsellers like Ibram X. Kendis bestseller Stamped from the Beginning and Isabel Wilkersons Caste identify the early modern western Mediterranean as the origin of racist ideas in America, naming the fifteenth-century Portuguese chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara as the inventor of racist ideologies that were transported to the Americas on the same ships that initiated the human disaster of the transatlantic slave trade. If the late medieval and early modern western Mediterranean was the cradle of American racist ideologies, I hope to mobilize my fields global, multicultural expertise to help my students unpack how the foundations of that system emerged and then diverged from categories used to differentiate late medieval and early modern Iberians.
Courses
- Intermediate Spanish 1
- Intermediate Spanish 2
- Spanish Composition & Conversation
- Early Modern Spanish Literature
- Don Quixote
Recent Work
- Forthcoming 2023. Skulls, Worms, and Angels: Teaching Ritual through the Grave in an Aljamiado Hadith. postmedieval.
- Forthcoming 2023. Body as Text and Text as Body: Ijzas and Oral Knowledge Transmission in the Ta尨r蘋kh al-dawla al-sa尪diyya. Medieval Encounters.
- Forthcoming 2023. With Emily Colbert Cairns (Salve Regina University), Female Materiality: Plus 癟a change, plus cest la m礙me chose. La cor籀nica 51, vol. 1.
- Forthcoming 2022. A Grammar of the Corpse: Necroepistemology in the Early Modern Mediterranean (New York: Fordham University Press). Awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association.
- Forthcoming 2022. "American Caste through Multicultural Iberia." In The Uses and Abuses of Early Modern Spanish Cultural Studies. Edited by Chad Leahy. (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press).
- Forthcoming 2022. Podcasting Las Casas and Robert E. Lee: A Case Study in Historicizing Race. In Teaching Race in the Renaissance. Edited by Anna Wainwright and Matthieu Chapman. (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies).
- 2020. Iberian Connections: Medieval and Early Modern Studies and Contemporary Critical Thought 7, no. 1.
- 2020. ConSecuencias 1.
- 2017. Embodied Authority: The Virgin, Audience, and the Body of the Devotee in Marian Miracles. La cor籀nica 45, no. 2: 936.
Involved In
- Spanish Club
- Medieval and Renaissance Studies