About Me
I am Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University (Atlanta, GA), where I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in colonial and eighteenth-century Spanish American and transatlantic literary and cultural studies. I received my Ph.D. in Spanish from Yale University and my B.A. in Spanish and French from Middlebury College. Prior to Emory, I taught at Vassar College for eight years; I also taught one summer at the Middlebury Summer Spanish Language School and offered a graduate seminar on Colonial Spanish American Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
My research focuses on eighteenth-century Spanish American literary and cultural studies and the Hispanic Enlightenment. Recent scholarly publications include The Black Legend of Spain and its Atlantic Empire in the Eighteenth Century | Liverpool University Press], co-edited with Catherine M. Jaffe and published in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series and available from Liverpool University Press (2024); DOMESTICATING EMPIRE: Enlightenment in Spanish America (2013); and essays on eighteenth-century studies in The Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment (2020), Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective (2021), and Mexican Literature as World Literature (2022). I co-edited with Mariselle Mélendez a 2015 issue of Colonial Latin America Review devoted to “Enlightenments in Ibero-America.”
I have extensive administrative and professional experience, and that professional engagement is an important part of my career trajectory. In addition to having served in my department as Chair, Director of Undergraduate Studies and Director of Graduate Studies, I am now serving on the editorial boards of Dieciocho and Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) Executive Board (elected), the MLA Forum Executive Committee for Colonial Latin American (elected), and the Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas Observatorio Permanente del Hispanismo (invited). I was elected to the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (MLA-ADFL) Executive Committee (2013-2017) and served as President of the committee 2016-2017. It has been an honor and a privilege to have been a trustee at Middlebury College, my alma mater, for many years; am currently Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees and Chair of the Strategy Committee.