I am the Sir John Elliott Fellow in Early Modern Spanish Studies at Exeter College. I grew up near Seattle, USA and studied Spanish and French as an undergraduate at Seattle University (2011). After teaching English with adult immigrants in Seattle for a year, I headed to Spain where I completed an MA in Culturas Árabe y Hebrea: Pasado y Presente at the Universidad de Granada (2013) and then an MA in Traducción Técnica at the Universidad de Zaragoza (2014). I then returned to the US and worked as a translator and private language instructor for a year before relocating to New York to complete a PhD in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University (2022). I am thrilled to be joining Exeter College because of its warm community of scholars and special strength in studies of early modern Iberia and Iberian worlds. In my spare time, you can find me in a kayak, on hiking trails, or cooking up a new dish to enjoy with friends.
Research
I am a scholar of the literatures and cultures of early modern Iberian worlds. I’m interested in religion, religious minorities, conversion, translation, and race from Spain to the Americas, to Southeast Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I examine how early modern writers incorporated ideas about the ways and languages that people spoke as they contested or contributed to the construction of racial concepts. Studying the development of racial ideas in different places and alongside questions regarding religion, language, and politics helps us understand the complex ways that ideas about race both draw off of earlier understandings and change in different historical and geographical contexts.
Publications
“Hearing Alcuzcuz: Word Play and the Production of Uncertainty in Amar después de la muerte,” in Soundscapes of the Early Modern Iberian Empires, ed. Víctor Sierra Matute (Routledge, forthcoming).
