Associate Professor of Spanish (on leave Fall 2018 & Winter 2019)
About
I am an Associate Professor in the Departments of Romance Languages and Literatures and Judaic Studies and an affiliate of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.
I study the cultures and literatures of medieval Iberia, focusing especially on cultural interaction, exchange, and conflict. My interests converge around polemical writing (religious disputations and conflicts) and translation (of languages, alphabets, styles, beliefs, identities, and ideas) as elements defining the relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
I am particularly interested in conversion as a vehicle for exchange (real and imagined) between disparate groups, as well as in modern scholarly debates about how to frame the history and criticism of Medieval Iberia and its cultures (One, two, or three cultures? Conquest or reconquest? Spanish or Iberian? Tolerance or persecution?). I have focused much of my research on the fourteenth-century convert Abner of Burgos (known as Alfonso of Valladolid after conversion). I am currently working on the Pugio fidei (Dagger of faith) of Catalan Dominican Ramon Martí, and also the Spanish polemics against Moriscos in sixteenth-century Spain (the so-called “anti-Qur’ans”). I am also developing a book on translation and genealogy in the court of Alfonso X of Castile.
Featured Articles
- 2018 “’Deleytaste del dulce sono y no pensaste en las palabras’: Rendering Arabic in the Antialcoranes.” Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies 5.1 (2018): 99–132. Co-authored with Mercedes García-Arenal and Katarzyna K. Starczewska.
- 2017 “Ramon Martí’s New Testament Citations in Hebrew. A Transcription and Further Observations.” In Ramon Martí’s Pugio Fidei: Studies and Texts. Ed. Görge K. Hasselhoff and Alexander Fidora. Santa Coloma de Queralt: Obrador Edèndum, 2017: 157–173.
- 2017 “From Convert to Convert: Two Opposed Trends in Late Medieval and Early Modern Anti-Jewish Polemic.” In Revealing the Secrets of the Jews: Johannes Pfefferkorn and Christian Writings about Jewish Life and Literature in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Hess. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. 219–244.
- 2017 “Conversion as a Historiographical Problem.” In Contesting Inter-Religious Conversion in the Medieval World. Ed. Yaniv Fox and Yosi Yisraeli. New York: Routledge, 2017. 24‒38.
