Dr Jacobo de Camps, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Humanities and College Lecturer in Spanish at Pembroke, University, and St Hilda’s College, has been awarded an MHRA scholarship for 2023–24. The award, one of only five such awards granted annually, will allow him to work within the Faculty on the final manuscript of his monograph, Walter Benjamin's Calderón: Literary Criticism and the Baroque, forthcoming in Legenda's Comparative Literature series.
The monograph, based on a doctoral thesis completed in 2022, reconstructs Walter Benjamin's reading of Spanish playwright Calderón de la Barca in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of the German Trauerspiel, 1928). It vindicates Benjamin's theory of the baroque for the study of early modern Spanish drama, and offers a reinterpretation of Benjamin's theory of literary criticism. All in all, the monograph presents Ursprung not as another scholarly study, but as a work of the imagination exploring the excitingly different worldview of a remote period.