Spanish Department
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Stanford University
M.A., University of Pennsylvania
Fields: early modern Mediterranean studies, early modern Iberian literature, historiography, Critical Race Studies, death studies, theories of the body
Throughout my research and teaching, I focus on the intersection of text, body, and power in narrative written at the height of Iberian expansion into Africa, Asia and the Americas, an approach that is methodologically informed by sociolinguistic and historicist approaches.
My book, A Grammar of the Dead: Necroepistemology in the Early Modern Mediterranean, forthcoming with Fordham University Press, examines the literary and epistemological role of the corpse in accounts of the battle of al-Qasr al-Kabir (1578). In it, I propose an approach to understanding how dead bodies anchored the construction of knowledge within early modern Mediterranean historiography. The eyewitness and the corpse cooperatively produce what I term necroepistemology: a system of knowledge grounded in or transmitted through first-hand experiences of the material dead. A Grammar of the Corpse argues that the presence of the corpse in historical narrative is not just incidental nor is it off-hand. Rather, it fills a central gap in testimonial narrative: it provides tangible evidence of the narrator’s reliability while simultaneously provoking a visceral, affective response to the disgusting presence of the dead. The use of corpses as a source of narrative authority mobilizes what cultural historians, philosophers, and social anthropologists have pointed to as the latent power of the dead for generating social and political meaning and knowledge.
As a teacher, I am keenly aware that many of my students have their doubts about either the utility or relevance of the early modern period to their twenty-first century world. I seek ways to draw connections between my classroom and the world outside of it, remembering the origins of my own interest in the history and literature of the pre-modern Iberian Peninsula in conversations about Islam and the West in a post-9/11 world. Recent bestsellers like Ibram X. Kendi’s bestseller Stamped from the Beginning and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste identify the early modern western Mediterranean as the origin of racist ideas in America, naming the fifteenth-century Portuguese chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara as the inventor of racist ideologies that were transported to the Americas on the same ships that initiated the human disaster of the transatlantic slave trade. If the late medieval and early modern western Mediterranean was the cradle of American racist ideologies, I hope to mobilize my field’s global, multicultural expertise to help my students unpack how the foundations of that system emerged and then diverged from categories used to differentiate late medieval and early modern Iberians.
Contact Information
Email: espragin@holycross.edu
Office Phone: 508-793-3961
Office: Stein 405
Courses
- Spanish 201 - Intermediate Spanish I
- Spanish 202 - Intermediate Spanish II
- Spanish 301 - Composition and Conversation
- Spanish 401 - Golden Age
- Spanish 402 - Don Quixote
Recent Work
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Forthcoming 2023. “Skulls, Worms, and Angels: Teaching Ritual through the Grave in an Aljamiado Hadith.” postmedieval.
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Forthcoming 2023. “Body as Text and Text as Body: Ijāzas and Oral Knowledge Transmission in the Taʾrīkh al-dawla al-saʿdiyya.” Medieval Encounters.
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Forthcoming 2023. With Emily Colbert Cairns (Salve Regina University), “Female Materiality: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” La corónica 51, vol. 1.
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Forthcoming 2022. 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.
- Forthcoming 2022. "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).
- Forthcoming 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. (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.
- 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