My research and teaching focus on the cultural and literary histories of early modern Iberia and colonial Latin America. I am generally interested in the ways in which some early modern historical processes such as the printing and military revolutions, or the first globalization, contributed to a partial democratization of literary practices. In this sense, I have taught and published on topics such as war writing, book history, travel literature, autobiography, and popular culture. Secondly, my work is concerned with the role that literary practices and institutions have played historically in the configuration of Iberia (and its worlds) as a space of remarkable linguistic, cultural, and political complexity. In this regard, I have published on topics such as linguistic history, translation, Luso-Hispanic relations, and cultural competition.
My first book, Front Lines. Soldiers’ Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) explores the writing and reading practices of the Spanish popular soldiery in both the Old and the New World. On the one hand, I argue that the common soldiers of the Spanish imperial armies played a key role in the shaping of Renaissance literary culture, by reinventing classical genres such as the epic, producing new regimes of truth for historical writing, and experimenting with new lyric and autobiographical subjectivities. On the other hand, I argue that these enriched literary traditions allowed soldiers to question received values and ideas about the social logic of warfare, the ethics of violence, and the legitimacy of imperial aggression. Through the soldiers’ republic of letters, servicemen and ex-combatants voiced discontent and articulated resistance.
I am currently working on two book projects: one on the literary culture of early colonial Manila in relation to the global renaissance; and the other on popular culture in early modern Spain. Additionally, I am finishing a critical edition of Catalina de Erauso’s Vida that for the first time takes into account the entire manuscript tradition of the text.