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) and co-editor (with Nick Jones) of Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production (Routledge, 2021). Another key area of interest in my teaching and research relates to thinking through the political and cultural uses of the medieval and early modern past in post-medieval and post-early modern times. I am currently editing a three-volume collection of essays (under contract with the University of Amsterdam Press) entitled On the Uses and Abuses of Early Modern Spanish Culture, which interrogates how historical memories of early modern Spain have been leveraged in various contexts since the 17th Century. My research has appeared in venues including Anuario Lope de Vega, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Cervantes, Criticón, Ctxt (Contexto y acción), Hispanic Review, Lemir, Quidditas, Revista de Literatura Medieval, RILCE, Romance Notes, and Symposium.