Education
Ph.D. in Spanish, University of Virginia (expected, spring 2025)
M.A. in Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish), University of Michigan (2016)
B.A. in Hispanic Studies & Environmental Studies, Illinois Wesleyan University (2008)
Dissertation Project
My research explores the movement of people, ideas, and traditions between the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa, and the broader Mediterranean in the sixteenth-to-seventeenth century.
My dissertation, Narrating Faith Across the Straits: Morisco Manuals of Faith in the Early Modern Mediterranean, focuses on the large Iberian Muslim community (referred to as Moriscos) that settled in Tunisia during the seventeenth century and the religious treatises that circulated among them. Through a study of Morisco legal, doctrinal, and didactic texts written in Arabic, Aljamiado, and Spanish, I argue that Moriscos creatively engaged with works from the North African Islamic tradition while strategically adapting literary forms and tropes rooted in Christian Europe to forge a narrative ethics reflecting their diaspora experience in the Mediterranean. I demonstrate that Morisco textual production shaped a Mediterranean milieu that is otherwise obfuscated by scholarly distinctions which are stubbornly attached to ideas of national, civilizational, and religious difference. Bringing together methodological frameworks from literature, philology, and Islamic studies, my dissertation generates new categories of analysis and criticism that challenge the very category of the “literary” in order to imagine more inclusive models of world literature.
Research and Teaching Interests
- Early Modern Iberian literature
- Morisco & Sephardic Studies
- Premodern Race & Religion
- Global Hispanophone Studies
- Mediterranean Studies
- North African Studies
- Migration, mobility, & diaspora
- World Religions & World Literatures
Teaching
University of Virginia, Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese
Instructor of Record
SPAN 3040 Business Spanish – upper-level course (Spring 2022)
SPAN 2010 Intermediate Spanish – Level 1 (Spring 2021)
SPAN 2010 Intermediate Spanish – Level 1 (Fall 2020)
University of Michigan, Romance Languages & Literatures
Graduate Student Instructor
SPAN 295 Introduction to Literature, Culture, and the Arts in the Hispanic World (Winter 2015)
SPAN 277 Spanish Grammar & Composition in Context: Short Stories (Fall 2014)
SPAN 232 Second-Year Spanish – Level 2 (Winter 2013)
SPAN 232 Second-Year Spanish – Level 2 (Fall 2012)
Teaching Assistant
SPAN 373 The Medieval Frame-Tale Tradition (Winter 2012)
The Experiment in International Living
Study Abroad Program Leader for Ecuador (Galapagos & the Andes)
Taught/facilitated 4-week program abroad on Ecuadorian language, culture & ecology (Summer 2017)
Selected Presentations
Invited talks:
“The Translator’s Task: Language, Law, and Pedagogy in the Morisco Diaspora.” Invited talk. Diasporas of Sefarad and al-Andalus: Iberian Questions beyond Iberia, 1492-1700. Symposium at Exeter College, University of Oxford, UK. April 2024.
“Morisco Manuals of Faith in Seventeenth Century Tunisia and their Iberian Echoes.” Invited talk. Colloque Internationale, Arabo-Hispanica II. Comprendre l’autre ou le convaincre? École Pratique des Hautes Étude (EPHE). Paris, France. November 2023.
Conference Presentations:
“The Duty to Translate: Morisco Language Politics and Religious Instruction in Tunisia.” Conference paper. Renaissance Society of America (RSA) Annual Conference. Chicago, Illinois, USA. March 2024.
“Early Modern Diasporas and Colonial Amnesia.” Roundtable organizer and discussant. Renaissance Society of America (RSA) Annual Conference. Chicago, Illinois, USA. March 2024
“Farḍ Kifāya in the Morisco Diaspora.” Roundtable Presentation on Religion, Ethnicity, Nation & Race. The Mediterranean Seminar Spring Workshop: Diasporic Legacies. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA. April 2023.
“Movement, Religious Practice & Affective Entanglement in Morisco Diasporic Texts.” Workshop presentation. Respondent: Gerard Wiegers. IS-LE Training School: Late Medieval and Early Modern Migration Routes and Identity Spaces in the Mediterranean. University of Tunis, Tunisia. June 2022.
“Ink, Agency, and the Writing of Truth in a Seventeenth Century Morisco Text.” Conference paper. Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Annual Conference. New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. November 2019.
“Exile, Empire, and Hospitality: Morisco Identity in Ottoman Tunisia.” Conference paper. Mapping the Mediterranean: Space, Memory, and the Long Road to Modernity. Mediterranean Topographies Workshop, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. October 2013.
Selected Grants and Awards
- Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship – Institute for Citizens & Scholars (2024-2025)
- Residential Doctoral Fellowship – Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB), Max Weber Foundation (2024-present)
- Teaching Relief Fellowship – University of Virginia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2023-2024
- Clay Graduate Fellow – UVA Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures (2022-2023)
- Dumas Malone Graduate Research Fellow – UVA Graduate School of Arts & Sciences (2022-2023)
- CARA Summer Scholarship – The Medieval Academy of America (2022)
- Summer Research Fellowship – UVA Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese (2022)
- Arts Humanities & Social Sciences Summer Research Fellowship – UVA GSAS (2022)
- Praxis Fellow in Digital Humanities – University of Virginia Scholars’ Lab (2021-2022)
- Global South Lab Prospectus Fellow –UVA Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures (2021)
- Charles Gordon Reid, Jr. Fellowship – UVA Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese (2021)
- Rackham Graduate Student Research Grant – University of Michigan (2015)
- Medieval and Early Modern Studies Summer Research Award – University of Michigan (2015)
- Center for European Studies Summer Research Grant – University of Michigan (2015)
- Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellow in Arabic – U.S. Department of Education (2013-2014)
Professional Development
RaceB4Race Mentorship Network Cohort (2023-2024)
Comparative/World/Global Working Group (UVA), Participating Member (2021)