Dana Bultman

Blurred image of the arch used as background for stylistic purposes.

Professor of Spanish and Head, Department of Romance Languages

I am a scholar of early modern Spanish literature and culture. My research examines the literary and religious writings of the Spanish Empire, and how these forms continue to inform global culture and collective experience today.

My publications include Heretical Mixtures: Feminine and Poetic Opposition to Matter-Spirit Dualism in Spain, 1531–1631, and a critical edition of Francisco de Osuna’s Norte de los estados, a Franciscan conduct manual for married couples. Across this work, I explore how poetry, narrative, and theological writing mediate relationships between individuals and the worlds they inhabit, and how aesthetic forms both sustain and contest structures of power.

My current monograph, Aesthetic Mediation and the Repair of Collective Life, examines the rural–urban divide in the works of Góngora, Cervantes, and Gracián. The project traces how innovative cultural forms shaped perception and social relations during Spain's crisis and decline as a world power, and how processes of imitation and recomposition can sustain systems of domination or open possibilities for collective repair.

My research has also taken shape through international scholarly collaboration and editorial work, including service as book review editor for Calíope and as President of GEMELA, where I helped foster interdisciplinary exchange across institutions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.

In recent years, I have extended this work into public humanities initiatives. I co-direct the VIPR Humanities in Public Life: A Multilingual Inquiry, a vertically integrated research project that brings students and faculty into collaborative, community-based work on storytelling, performance, and cultural life.

Graduate students are encouraged to review my guidelines for working together.

Research

Research Areas:

Latin American, Iberian & Latinx Studies

Literary Aesthetics & Poetics

Research Interests:

Early modern Spanish literature; Baroque aesthetics and theology; women writers; public humanities and cultural mediation; literary theory

Frequently Taught Courses

Courses Regularly Taught:

Selected Publications

Selected Publications:

BOOKS

Francisco de Osuna’s Norte de los estados in Modernized Spanish: A Practical Guide to Conjugal Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Leeds, UK: ARC Humanities Press, 2019. 360 pp.
Heretical Mixtures: Feminine and Poetic Opposition to Matter-Spirit Dualism in Spain, 1531-1631. Valencia, Spain: Albatros-Hispanófila Siglo XXI, 2007. 229 pp. (on Luis de Góngora's poetics).

ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS

“Josefa Amar’s Enlightened Silences: Drawing Divisions with a Peculiar Catalogue of Early Modern Women,” in Journal of Gender and Sexuality Studies/ Revista de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades (2024) 50 (1-2): 41-61. https://doi.org/10.14321/jgendsexustud.50.1-2.0041
"Waste, Exclusion, and the Responsibility of the Rich: A Franciscan Critique of Early Capitalist Europe." Religions. 13.9 (2022): 18pp. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13090818
"Winds, Heart, and Heat in Premodern Franciscan and Nahua Concepts of 'Soul.'" Colonial Latin American Review. 27.3 (2018): 296-315. https://doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2018.1527525
“‘Your Clogs will be My Stairway to Heaven:’ A Wife’s Spiritual Goodness in Francisco de Osuna’s Reformist Dialogue on Marriage, Norte de los estados.” Paradigm Shifts during the Global Middle Ages and Renaissance. Ed. Albrecht Classen. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2019: 255-78.
“Social Class.” In Using Primary Sources: A Practical Guide for Students. Ed. Jonathan Hogg. Liverpool University Press and University of Liverpool Library in partnership with KISC, 2017. An Open Access e-textbook.
“Jealousy in María de Zayas’s Intercalated Poetry: Lyric Illness and Narrative Cure.” In Golden Age Poetry in Motion. Eds. Jean Andrews and Isabel Torres. Woodbridge, England: Tamesis, 2014: 145-163.
“Conceptualización de la naturaleza creativa: Góngora y Luis Martín de la Plaza en Flores de poetas ilustres (1605).” In Los géneros poéticos del Siglo de Oro: Centros y periferias. Eds. Rodrigo Cacho Casal y Anne Holloway. Woodbridge, England: Tamesis, 2013: 295-312.
“Humanist and Mystical Understanding in Luis de León’s ‘Noche serena’ and John of the Cross’s ‘La noche oscura.’” In Approaches to Teaching Teresa of Avila and the Spanish Mystics. Ed. Alison Weber. New York: Modern Language Association, 2009: 232-239.
“Fray Luis de León.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 318: Sixteenth-Century Spanish Writers. Ed. Gregory B. Kaplan. Columbia, SC: Bruccoli, Clarke & Layman, Inc., 2006: 138-146.
“Sixteenth-Century Spanish Humanism.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 318: Sixteenth-Century Spanish Writers. Ed. Gregory B. Kaplan. Columbia, SC: Bruccoli, Clarke & Layman, Inc., 2006: 296-304.
“The Early Modern Sonnet's Lessons of Petrarchism and Militarism.” Ed. Edward Friedman. Calíope 11.2 (2005): 33-43.
“Góngora’s Invocation of Prudente Cónsul: Censorship and Humanist Doubts about his Lyric Language.” Hispanófila 142 (2004): 1-19.
“Scripted Oralities circa 1607-1617: Language and Intention in Góngora’s Las firmezas de Isabela and Lope’s Lo fingido verdadero.” Bulletin of the Comediantes 55.1 (2003): 47-67.
“Shipwreck as Heresy: Placing Góngora’s Poetry in the Wake of Renaissance Epic, Fray Luis and the Christian Kabbala.” Hispanic Review 70.3 (2002): 413-432.

Articles Featuring Dana Bultman

Congratulations to Erin Bolívar!

Tuesday, March 7, 2023 - 9:20pm

Erin Bolívar was awarded a Spring 2023 Willson Center for Humanities and Arts Graduate Research Award for her dissertation research on the portrayal of the Virgin Mary in Spanish and Italian painting and poetry.

Felicitationes & Complimenti!