I grew up in the Midlands, did my BA in Classics and Spanish at Oxford and PhD at Cambridge, and have also spent brief periods living in Argentina, the US and South Korea. I have been at Exeter since 2017.
Research
My research focuses on early modern Hispanic literature across Europe and the colonial Americas. I have published on poetry and drama and am interested in the ways that imaginative literature can think through notions of the body politic, violent conflict and the resistance to it, faith and identity. My first monograph, The Epic Mirror: Poetry, Conflict Ethics and Political Community in Colonial Peru, studies how Spanish-American writers and veterans at the turn of the seventeenth century used epic poetry to search for ethical solutions to the violent conflicts of their age in a multipolar colonial world. My next project looks at sacred epic written in Spanish, with a particular emphasis on the Sephardic Jewish diaspora.
Teaching
I teach all areas of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spanish literature, as well as translation. I am keen to hear from potential graduate students interested in early modern Hispanic literature and culture.
Selected Publications
The Epic Mirror: Poetry, Conflict Ethics and Political Community in Colonial Peru (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2022)
Rodrigo Cacho and Imogen Choi, eds, The Rise of Spanish American Poetry, 1500-1700: Literary and Cultural Transmission in the New World (Oxford: Legenda, 2019)
Imogen Choi and Felipe Valencia, ‘The Tragedy of Women in Power: La Araucana and Sixteenth-Century Neo-Senecan Theatre’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 2022
‘La presencia oculta de Torquato Tasso en la Tercera parte de La Araucana de Alonso de Ercilla (1589-90)’, Bulletin Hispanique, 2019
‘The Spectacle of Conquest: Epic Conflicts on the Seventeenth-Century Spanish Stage’, in Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, Stephen Harrison, and Claire Kenward, eds, Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)
‘”De gente que a ningún rey obedecen”: Republicanism and Empire in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana’, BHS 91.4 (2014), 417-35
