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Biography

Ricardo Padrón is a Professor of Spanish who studies the literature and culture of the early modern Hispanic world, particularly questions of empire, space, and cartography. His recently published monograph, The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West (Chicago 2020) examines the place of Pacific and Asia in the Spanish concept of “the Indies.”  His research for this book has taken him to China, Japan, and the Philippines, and has been sponsored by U.Va.’s Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, Arts & Sciences at U.Va., and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It earned Honorable Mention for the Modern Language Association's Katherine Signer Kovacs Prize. Prof. Padrón has also published on early modern poetry and historiography, and on the mapping of imaginary worlds in modern times. He is an active member of the Renaissance Society of America, and is currently serving as a member of its Board of Directors. He is also the founding president of The Society for Early Transpacific Studies. He serves as Director of Graduate Studies in Spanish. During the Spring of 2022, Prof. Padrón spent part of his research leave as a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Education

Ph.D., Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard

M.A., Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard

A.M., Divinity, Chicago

B.A., Political and Social Thought, University of Virginia

Publications

Books

The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815, Volume 2, co-edited with Christina Lee (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). 

The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West (University of Chicago Press, 2020).

The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815: A Reader of Primary Sources in English Translation, co-edited with Christinia Lee (Amsterdam University Press, 2020)

The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (University of Chicago Press, 2004) 

Recent Articles

Padrón, Ricardo. “A Sea of Denial: The Early Modern Spanish Invention of the Pacific Rim.” Hispanic Review 77, no. 1 (2008): 1–27.

———. “From Abstraction to Allegory: The Imperial Cartography of Vicente de Memije.” In Early American Cartographies, edited by Martin Brückner, 35–66. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

———. “Mapping without Maps.” In The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space, 314–22. New York: Routledge, 2017.

———. “Multitudo Insularum: The Rhetoric of Numbers and the Mapping of the Indies.” In Far From the Truth: Distance, Information, and Credibility in the Early Modern World, edited by Johannes Müller and Michiel van Groesen, 106–27. The Hakluyt Society Studies in the History of Travel. S.l.: ROUTLEDGE, 2024.

———. “Producing China: Sinophobia vs. Sinophilia in the Sixteenth Century Iberian World.” Review of Culture (Instituto Cultural Do Governo Da R.A.E de Macau) 46 (2014): 94–107.

———. “Recordando Las Indias Del Poniente: Episodios En La Historia de Una Metageografía Olvidada.” In Estudios Coloniales Latinoamericanos En El Siglo XXI: Nuevos Itinerarios, edited by Stephanie Kirk, 39–67. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, Universidad de Pittsburgh, 2011.

———. “Spanish Cartography.” In Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation, edited by Evonne Anita Levy. Austin, Tex.: Univ. of Texas Press, 2013.

———. “(Un)Inventing America: The Transpacific Indies in Oviedo and Gómara.” Colonial Latin American Review 25, no. 1 (2016): 16–34.

Padrón, Ricardo, and Risa Puleo. “Race, Empire, and Cartography.” In Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World, edited by Noémie Ndiaye and Lia Markey. ACMRS Press, 2023.