Research interests:

  • Interdisciplinary approaches to Golden Age Spanish literary and cultural studies
  • Colonial Latin American literary and cultural studies
  • Renaissance and baroque architecture and art history
  • Early modern science
  • Indigenous cultures and languages
  • Postcolonial studies

Current project: Building a Modern Topos: Architecture, Literature, and Modernity in Cervantes

Gustave Doré, Cave of Montesinos (Don Quijote, 1868)

My dissertation project examines three of Miguel de Cervantes’ late novelistic works (Don Quijote, the Exemplary Novels, and The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda) through the combined lenses of philology and architectural history. While critics tend to dismiss the importance of architectural spaces in Cervantes’ novels, characterizing them as formulaic vignettes, evidence of an emerging literary realism, or symbols of an oppressive social order, I argue for a contextualization of these spaces in relation to Renaissance architectural theory and practice, as well as architectural metaphors in the Western literary and philosophical traditions. I contend that, in an era marked by the rediscovery of the Vitruvian building-body analogy, the redefinition of architecture as an intellectual art, interest in classical rhetoric (in which architectural analogies were common), and the emergence and transformation of major urban centers, architectural spaces bear significantly upon concepts of the self, the world, and the nature of literary creation. I thus argue that architectural discourse is integral to Cervantes’ narrative innovations and the incipiently modern worldview for which his works are celebrated, serving as a narrative device with which to “reconstruct” literary topoi (“places” and “commonplaces”) in accordance with a Renaissance vision of the individual and his or her representation in literature.