Biography
Elizabeth Spragins is the author of the award-winning A Grammar of the Corpse: Necroepistemology in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Fordham University Press, 2023; 2021 Helen Tartar First Book Subvention and 2024 Roland H. Bainton Literature Prize), which examines the literary and epistemological role of the corpse in accounts of the battle of al-Qasr al-Kabir (1578) and proposes an approach to understanding how dead bodies anchored the construction of knowledge within early modern Mediterranean historiography. Her research and teaching focus on prose narrative from the early modern Western Mediterranean in Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic, with particular attention to race, gender, identity, authority, and multicultural exchange. She is also co-editor of Cervantine Perversities, with Leyla Rouhi and Sonia Pérez Villanueva.
Recent Work
- Forthcoming. “Believe Dorotea: Intersectional Sexual Violence in Don Quixote.” In Cervantine Perversity, edited by Leyla Rouhi, Elizabeth Spragins, and Sonia Pérez Villanueva.
- Forthcoming. “Intersectional Racecraft in La Conquista de Jerusalén: Clorinda and the Trope of the Cervantine White African Maiden.” In Cervantes in Transit, edited by Paul Michael Johnson, Chad Leahy, and Elizabeth Neary.
- Forthcoming. “Approximating Intelligibility: Early Modern Raciolinguistics.” In Language Fusion and Contact in Medieval and Early Modern Spanish-Speaking Worlds, edited by Veronica Menaldi et al (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols).
- Forthcoming. “Necropastoral and Conflicting Modes of Testimony in Don Quixote’s Tale of Grisóstomo and Marcela.” In Cervantine Futures: Theorizing Cervantes after the Critical Turn, edited by Nicholas R. Jones and Paul Johnson. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
- 2025. With Emily Colbert Cairns (Salve Regina University), “Following the Bloodlines in María de Zayas’s El traidor contra su sangre.” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 19, no. 2, 310–31.
- 2023. “Body as Text and Text as Body: Ijāzas and Oral Knowledge Transmission in Sixteenth-Century Morocco.” Medieval Encounters 29, 315–39.
- 2023. “Skulls, Worms, and Angels: Teaching Ritual through the Grave in an Aljamiado Hadith.” postmedieval 13, 533–48.
- 2023. “Body as Text and Text as Body: Ijāzas and Oral Knowledge Transmission in the Taʾrīkh al-dawla al-saʿdiyya.” Medieval Encounters 29, 315–39
- 2023. With Emily Colbert Cairns (Salve Regina University), “Female Materiality: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” La corónica 51, vol. 1.
- 2023. A Grammar of the Corpse: Necroepistemology in the Early Modern Mediterranean (New York: Fordham University Press). Awarded Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Award by the American Comparative Literature Association and the Roland H. Bainton Prize by the Sixteenth Century Society
- Forthcoming . "American Caste through Multicultural Iberia." In The Uses and Abuses of Early Modern Spanish Cultural Studies. Edited by Chad Leahy. (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press).
- 2022. “Podcasting Las Casas and Robert E. Lee: A Case Study in Historicizing Race.” In Teaching Race in the Renaissance. Edited by Anna Wainwright and Matthieu Chapman, 451–68. (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies).
- 2020. “On Collaboration: The Future of Mediterranean, Iberian, and Early Modern Studies is Collaborative.” Iberian Connections: Medieval and Early Modern Studies and Contemporary Critical Thought 7, no. 1.
- 2020. “Cuerpos, cuernos, and espadas ceñidas: Corpses and the Writing of Catalina de Erauso’s Authoritative Body.” ConSecuencias 1, no. 1.
- 2017. “Embodied Authority: The Virgin, Audience, and the Body of the Devotee in Marian Miracles.” La corónica 45, no. 2: 9–36.
Involved In
- Spanish Club
- Medieval and Renaissance Studies
- Critical Race and Ethnic Studies