Research
My research focusses on the literature and culture of the early modern Hispanic world (1500-1700), with a particular interest in religious culture, women’s writing, and the relationship between religious thought and early modern scientific enquiry. My first book explored the presence of empirical ideas in the religious plays by the Mexican poet and nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who was one of the most significant literary figures of colonial New Spain (The autos sacramentales of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Natural Philosophy and Sacramental Theology, OUP, 2018). My second-book length work, a translation and critical edition of Sor Juana’s Crisis sobre un sermón (Critique of a Sermon, 1690) opens up one of her most groundbreaking, yet rarely read works. As the only known published theological critique by an early modern Hispanic woman, it puts into practice what she would later argue in her more famous Respuesta a sor Filotea (1691): that women could, and should, engage in theological study, and that a woman’s well-reasoned argument would defeat any man’s ill-founded and unorthodox thought. The book was awarded an ‘honorable mention’ by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender. I have also published on the role of curiosity in Sor Juana’s Respuesta, on Marian images in her villancicos, on the role of silence in the works of Sor Juana and Teresa of Ávila, and on Golden Age theatre. I am currently working on the poetry of two early modern Carmelite women, Cecilia del Nacimiento and Ana de la Trinidad, and beginning a larger-scale project on the notion of dignity in early modern Spanish intellectual and theological thought.
Supervision
Over the past several years, I have supervised doctoral students on a range of topics related to the early modern Hispanic world, including on women's devotional writing, the auto sacramental, Marian iconography, the history of the book, and the presence of indigenous epistemologies in colonial texts. I welcome proposals from students who are interested in studying topics related to early modern literature and natural philosophy, women's writing and representations of women, the study of virtue, and devotional literature and practices in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both in Spain and Spanish America.
Selected Publications
Books
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Critique of a Sermon and Other Letters: Crisis sobre un sermón, Carta de sor Filotea, Respuesta a sor Filotea (Liverpool University Press, 2025).
The autos sacramentales of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Natural philosophy and sacramental theology (Oxford University Press, 2018)
Chapters and articles
'"Y yo callé": Speech and Silence in Spanish Golden Age Women's Life Writings', La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures and Cultures (2022)
'La soberana doctora de las escuelas divinas: Sor Juana's Mariology in her villancicos on the Feast of the Assumption (1676)', in Cacho Casal and Choi, eds. The Rise of Spanish American Poetry, 1500-1700 (Cambridge: Legenda, 2019)
“‘Las ciencias curiosas’: Curiosity, Studiousness and the New Philosophy in the Carta de Sor Filotea de la Cruz and the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 94.7 (2017): 697–714.