Dr Imogen Choi

Research

I work on early modern literature, culture and political thought. My research to date has been united by an interest in the development of ideas surrounding armed conflict and the nature of political community in the global Iberian empires. I have explored these themes primarily as they emerged in the colonial Americas through the medium of epic poetry. My next project maintains a focus on connections across the Iberian world, on empire and its counter-discourses, but develops a new emphasis on religious identity and minority communities, in particular through the poetry of the Sephardic diaspora. 

Teaching

All areas of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spanish literature (papers VII, X, XII, XIV), as well as translation and the Prelims (first-year) course.

Graduate Teaching

I welcome applications from MSt and DPhil students working on early modern Hispanic literature and culture, especially those with an interest in poetry, religious culture and/or colonial Latin America.

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 (Cambridge: Legenda, 2019)

‘La presencia oculta de Torquato Tasso en la Tercera parte de La Araucana de Alonso de Ercilla (1589-90)’, Bulletin Hispanique 121. 1 (2019), 73-101

‘Os lusíadas and Armas antárticas: Eros, Eris and the Art of Imitation in Colonial Epic’, in Rodrigo Cacho and Imogen Choi, eds, The Rise of Spanish American Poetry, 1500-1700: Literary and Cultural Transmission in the New World, pp. 222-238

‘Épopée, guerre coloniale et communauté politique dans le vice-royaume du Pérou, 1560-1610’, trans. Aude Plagnard, Receuil Ouvert (2018)

‘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), pp. 336-350

‘¿”Adonde falta el rey, sobran agravios” (IV.5)? The Siege of Saint-Quentin and Two Worlds of War in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana’, in Stephen Boyd and Terence O’Reilly (eds) Artifice and Invention in the Spanish Golden Age (Cambridge: Legenda, 2014), pp. 173-84

‘”De gente que a ningún rey obedecen”: Republicanism and Empire in Alonso de

Ercilla’s La Araucana’, BHS 91.4 (2014), 417-35