I am a Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies who teaches on the Modern Languages, Comparative Literature and Culture and Liberal Arts programmes in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. I have dual research interests in the early modern world (peninsular Spain and Spanish America) and 20th and 21st century Latin America (Bolivia).
My work in early modernity is mainly focused on religion, with equal emphasis on the realms of private devotion and public display. My research explores how belief and its politics, whether individual or institutional, shapes artistic and cultural production in 16th and 17th century Spain and colonial America, from poetry and plays to painting and parades. I also have an interest in pilgrimage practices and organised a Pilgrimage Season of events which included an exhibition, a conference, two concerts and a round table discussions on pilgrimage in different faiths, amongst other activities. My research in contemporary Latin America is focused on poetry from the 1960s onwards with a particular interest in the Bolivian context and the work of Pedro Shimose.
My Comparative Hispanic Culture course explores links between the past and the present, Europe and Latin America, contrasting views of power, violence and discovery, amongst other topics, in texts ranging from Hernán Cortés’s Letters to Picasso’s Guernica, Sofonisba Anguissola’s Philip II to Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat. Period-focused modules include Devotion, Deceit and Desire in early modern Spanish Literature and Conflict in 20th-century Latin American Literature and Culture. I also contribute to Visual Arts courses, teaching a range of topics from Spanish processional sculpture to religious painting.
I currently have two books under contract, one in each of my areas of interest: Music, Language and Rhetoric: The Post-revolutionary Poetics of Pedro Shimose (Institute of Modern Languages Research), on post-1960s poetics in Bolivia, and Teresa of Avila: The Making of an Icon (Tamesis), on the work of the 16th-century Spanish nun and the artistic responses (from Marina Abramovic to Julia Kristeva’s) it continues to generate.
I am an Assistant Editor of the Bulletin of Spanish Studies and of the Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies. I also coordinate the mentoring scheme for the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland and serve as convenor of the Dorothy Sherman Severin Fellowship.
More information about my research is available via PURE.
