Biography
Elizabeth Spragins is the author of the award-winning (Fordham University Press, 2023; 2021 and ), 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.
Courses
- Intermediate Spanish 1
- Intermediate Spanish 2
- Spanish Composition & Conversation
- Aspects of Spanish Culture
- Early Modern Spanish Literature
- Don Quixote
- Early Modern Iberian Race
- Honors Seminar: Framing the Mediterranean
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), Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 19, no. 2, 310–31.
- 2023. Medieval Encounters 29, 315–39.
- 2023. postmedieval 13, 533–48.
- 2023. “Body as Text and Text as Body: Ijāzas and Oral Knowledge Transmission in the Taʾrīkh al-dawla al-saʿdiyya.”&Բ;Medieval Encounters 29, 315–39
- 2023. With Emily Colbert Cairns (Salve Regina University), La corónica 51, vol. 1.
- 2023. A Grammar of the Corpse: Necroepistemology in the Early Modern Mediterranean (New York: Fordham University Press). Awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association and the
- 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.”&Բ;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. Iberian Connections: Medieval and Early Modern Studies and Contemporary Critical Thought 7, no. 1.
- 2020. ConSecuencias 1, no. 1.
- 2017. La corónica 45, no. 2: 9–36.
Involved In
- Spanish Club
- Medieval and Renaissance Studies
- Critical Race and Ethnic Studies