Associate Professor

Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Education

PhD, Hispanic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Berkeley

MA, Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago

BA, Music, University of California, Davis

BA, Spanish, University of California, Davis

Biography

I am a scholar of the literature and culture of early modern Spain. My research has two lines of inquiry: interdisciplinary connections across art forms, and new readings of the works of Miguel de Cervantes, especially Don Quijote.

I have published on topics like voice, music, and sound; the history of the senses; and relationships between court music and painting. My research asks: what can we glean from an inter-sensorial understanding of different works of musical, visual, or literary art? How does a full sensorial accounting convey unexpected meanings? I respond to these questions in my second monograph, Sense and Spectacle in the Age of Philip IV: Performing Empire in Word, Music, and Image (Amsterdam University Press 2024), which describes the outpouring of celebrations in the Habsburg Empire upon the 1657 birth of Felipe Próspero, heir to Philip IV of Spain. My study of zarzuela texts, opera libretti, notated music, paintings, poems, and historical documents reveals that an array of people took advantage of this festive moment to question the empire’s policies in surprising ways. I further advocate for the centrality of sound studies in Aural Culture and Poetics in the Early Modern Hispanic World: Sound, Rhythm and Music, a special double issue I co-edited with Steven Hutchinson for the Bulletin of Spanish Studies (2023).

I also have enduring interests in the study of literary genres and have published on formal aspects of the ballad, the zarzuela, and the novel. My first book, The Moor and the Novel: Narrating Absence in Early Modern Spain (Palgrave Macmillan 2013), engages literature, music, and history to uncover fundamental connections between nationalist violence, religious identity, and the birth of the novel. I am currently working on a book about Don Quijote for Cambridge University Press’s series, Elements of the Novel.

An award-winning teacher, I take great joy in helping my students puzzle through challenging texts, especially Don Quijote and Baroque poetry. As the only Peninsularist in UNM’s Department of Spanish & Portuguese, I teach courses on Spanish literature and culture from the pre-modern period through the twenty-first century. My pedagogical enthusiasm stems from my belief that engagement in the humanities makes for a better world.

Research Interests

• Miguel de Cervantes
• Music (vihuela, Baroque zarzuela, Baroque opera) and sound studies
• Painting (Rubens and Velázquez)
• Festival culture of the 17th-century Habsburg Empire