Chad Leahy

My work focuses on the intersection of religion, politics, gender, and race in the cultures of early modern Spain and medieval Iberia. In my classes, we explore these issues in courses including “Sex, Bodies, and Power in Imperial Spain,” “Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia,” “Life Writing in Imperial Spain,” “The Quixote Archive,” “Spectacle and Performance in Early Modern Spain,” “Poetry Smackdown in Old Spain,” and “Cervantes and the Canon.” My research centers especially around the place of Jerusalem in the historical invention of Spain, and I am currently completing a monograph on this topic entitled Jerusalem and the Early Modern Invention of Spain. I am also co-author (with Ken Tully) of Jerusalem Afflicted: Quaresmius, Spain, and the Idea of a 17th-Century Crusade (Routledge 2021), co-editor (with Nick Jones) of Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production (Routledge, 2021), and co-editor (with Paul Michael Johnson and Elizabeth Neary) of Cervantes in Transit (University of Deleware Press, expected summer 2026). My research has appeared in venues including Anuario Lope de Vega, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Cervantes, Criticón, Ctxt (Contexto y acción), Hispanic Review, Lemir, Mediterranean Studies, Quidditas, Revista de Literatura Medieval, RILCE, Romance Notes, and Symposium.