The department is very pleased to announce the hiring of Professor Noelia Cirnigliaro as Assistant Professor of Spanish, starting on July 1, 2009. Noelia, a native of Argentina, obtained a degree of "Licenciada" in Hispanic Literature at Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2002. She holds an M.A (2005) and a Ph.D in Spanish (2009) from the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Her primary field is the "Golden Age", i.e., the literature, history, and culture of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Spain. Currently she is working on seventeenth-century literary, theatrical, and visual representations of Madrid's domestic practices, material culture, and space, and their connections to processes of urban transformations. Also, she is interested in the early modern ethics of well-living and well-dying and the fictional and non-fictional consolatory texts in which those ethics are expressed. In her next project, she plans to focus on representations of death, pain, and health in the notion of consolation in early modern times.
In Fall 09, she will teach:
Span 30: Introduction to Hispanic Studies I: Middle Ages to 17th Century. This course presents an overview of major literary trends and cultural productions from the Middle Ages to the 17th century in both their Spanish and Spanish American contexts.
and, Span 40 with the title: "From Corbacho to Camacho: love, marriage, and sexuality in Early Modern Spain." This course will study the Early Modern era in Spain (16th and 17th centuries) through a corpus of literary texts, conduct manuals, theater, and painting. Special attention will be devoted to the construction of social discourses on love, marriage, and sexuality. Our list of readings includes the Archpriest of Talavera's El Corbacho, Fray Luis de León's La Perfecta Casada, Garcilaso de la Vega's love sonnets, San Juan de la Cruz and Santa Teresa de Avila's mystic poetry, classic theater by Lope de Vega, satires by Francisco de Quevedo, and excerpts of Cervantes's Don Quixote, which we will study in tandem with religious, erotic, and historic painting. Both visual and textual representations of homosexuality and heterosexuality as well as divine and human love and marriage will contribute to enriching our understanding of the historical specificity of the early modern period and its culture.
