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Elizabeth Wright

Elizabeth R. Wright, Distinguished Research Professor
Blurred image of the arch used as background for stylistic purposes.
Distinguished Research Professor, Spanish Literature
Editor, Bulletin of the Comediantes
Associate Academic Director, Willson Center for Humanities and Arts

I am a scholar of the literature and culture of Spanish early modernity. My publications ponder the diverse writing practices with which people and communities grappled with expanded geographic and cultural horizons that came into view as a result of transatlantic navigation and empire building. I also serve as editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes

My publications include The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance (University of Toronto Press). In a book in progress, Iberia's Atlantic Households: Slavery and Diaspora in the Age of Empire (1444-1640), I ask how rulers, church leaders, and regular citizens became complicit in a mode of human trafficking that was contrary to religious tenets and age-old labor practices. See a piece from my introductory chapter in this collaborative volume on the Trajectories of Empire (Vanderbilt University Press).

Earlier, I cast new light on the writing career of Europe’s first literary celebrity, the poet-and-playwright Lope de Vega (Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III). In turn, I prepared a critical edition of Lope’s inventive news play, Los ramilletes de Madrid (in Parte XI de las Comedias de Lope de Vega, vol. 1 of 2, Gredos, 2012; forthcoming as a revised online edition. I also examined how a mestizo priest descended from Aztec royalty reinterpreted Spanish theater by Lope and other major Golden Age playwrights in collaboration with Louise Burkhart and Barry Sell, yielding Spanish Golden-Age Drama in Mexican Translation, Nahuatl Theater Set, vol. 3, University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. For another collaboration, I translated and edited Latin poetry that circulated around the world in the wake of the Battle of Lepanto, as co-editor with Sarah Spence and Andrew Lemons, for The Battle of Lepanto, I Tatti Renaissance Library of Harvard University Press.

I have secured grants from the John Carter Brown Library; the Newberry Library; the American Philosophical Society; the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH); the Renaissance Society of America; the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center; the Fulbright; the Mellon Global Georgia Project of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts; and the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University. My awards at UGA include the Distinguished Research Professor, Creative Research Medal, and the Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award from the Office of Research, as well as the M. G. Michael Award from the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

In teaching and mentoring, I help students immerse themselves in Spanish language and cultures, while also devising research and writing projects that draw on the riches of UGA’s libraries and other campus resources. 

Research Interests:

I study and teach about early modern Spain in the context of imperial expansion. I am also the editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes, the international journal devoted to the study of early-modern Spanish theater. My book, The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2016), traces how this Black poet and educator secured higher education, freedom, and social prominence. Now I examining the Portuguese-Spanish cultural nexus for Iberia's Atlantic Households: Slavery and Diaspora in the Age of Empire (1444-1640). This book in preparation asks how a new mode of slave trafficking that did not fit Mediterranean traditions of “just war” slavery became integrated into the fabric of economic life, language, and humor despite the widespread awareness of its manifest cruelty and dubious legality.  Earlier projects have included: examinations of the literary career of poet-and-playwright Lope de Vega in a monograph (Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, Bucknell University Press, 2001) andan annotated critical edition of Los ramilletes de Madrid (in Parte XI de las Comedias de Lope de Vega, vol. 1 of 2, Gredos, 2012); the collaborative study of how a mestizo priest descended from Aztec royalty reinterpreted Spanish theater in Nahuatl, the most widely spoken Amerindian language of colonial Mexico (co-editor with Louise Burkhart and Barry Sell of Spanish Golden-Age Drama in Mexican Translation, Nahuatl Theater Set, vol. 3, University of Oklahoma Press, 2008); an edition and translation of neo-Latin poetry that circulated in Spain and Italy in the wake of the Battle of Lepanto, prepared with Sarah Spence and Andrew Lemons (The Battle of Lepanto, I Tatti Renaissance Library, Harvard University Press, 2014).

 

 

Grants:

Outside grants:

 

National Endowment for the Humanities, Collaborative Research Grant, co-principal investigator with Dr. Nicholas Jones, Yale Univ.). $96,000. August 2021.

Best Journal Design (Bulletin of the Comediantes). Conferred by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. 2019.

Mellon Foundation Global Georgia Program / Willson Center for the Humanities and Arts, three-year research grant ($18,000), co-principal investigator (with Dr. Benjamin Ehlers). 2019–21.

National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Stipend, 2018. 

Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Fellowship awarded for March 2015.

American Philosophical Society, Franklin Research Grant. Awarded March 2014.

Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. Co-recipient with Sarah Spence. June 23 – July 21, 2011.

National Endowment for the Humanities, Scholarly Edition and Translation Grant, Crosscurrents and Confluences:  An Annotated Edition and Translation of Latin Poetry on the Battle of Lepanto (1571), principal investigator. 2010-2012.  

Fulbright, Honorary Senior Scholar Research Award. Awarded by the Comisión Fulbright (Spain) for January–June 2008.

Renaissance Society of America, Research Grant for Senior Scholars. May–June 2007.

Committee for Cultural Cooperation between Spain and the United States, Book Subvention. Co-recipient with Burkhart and Sell, on behalf of the University of Oklahoma Press. July 2006.

Committee for Cultural Cooperation between Spain and the United States. Research Grant, July 2005.

Newberry Library, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Scholar in Residence from September 2004 to June 2005.

National Endowment for the Humanities, Collaborative Research Grant, 2003-2005, for Nahuatl Theater Project. Co-recipient (principal investigator Louise M. Burkhart).

American Philosophical Society, Franklin Research Grant. Awarded April 2003.

John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Andrew W. Mellon post-doctoral fellowship. Scholar in residence from January through July, 2002.

Newberry Library. Audrey Lumsden-Kouvel fellowship. Scholar in residence from September through December, 2001.

 

Selected Publications:

Books

The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016.

The Battle of Lepanto. Co-editor with Sarah Spence and Andrew Lemons. I Tatti Renaissance Library, vol. 61. Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2014. 

Los ramilletes de Madrid, by Lope de Vega. Critical edition. In Parte XI de las Comedias de Lope de Vega, vol. 1 of 2. Project coordinated by Laura Fernández and Gonzalo Pontón. Madrid:  Gredos, 2012. pp. 469-619.

Co-editor with Louise M. Burkhart and Barry D. Sell, Spanish Golden-Age Drama in Mexican Translation. Norman, OK:  University of Oklahoma Press, 2008.

Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 1598-1621. Lewisburg, PA:  Bucknell University Press, 2001.

 

Of note:

 

 

 

 

Education:

 

Johns Hopkins University. Ph.D. in Spanish literature. 1998.

Northwestern University. Master of Arts in English literature. 1992.

University of Illinois. Bachelor of Arts.  1985.

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