Research Summary

Loreto's (she/ ella) research focuses on Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina (ca. 1499) as a work that radically questions the white Christian-supremacist patriarchal discourses of the state. Instead of reading Celestina as a purely didactic and orthodox piece of literature, she unveils the ways in which Rojas's book does dissident work by representing from an awry perspective the multiple contradictions, faults, and oppositional forces effaced by the ideological fabric of late medieval and early modern Spain.

Her current project, tentatively titled Words in Between: Celestina and the Narratives of Early Modernity, situates the composition of Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina and its reception within diverse cultural, demographic and ideological contexts exploring the different ways in which the book was responsive to the epistemological and sociopolitical transformations of Spain, both as a national entity and as transoceanic and Mediterranean power. She discusses Rojas’s work and its reception against the spread of lay literacy, the politics and propagandistic image of Isabel I, the Sephardic diaspora after the expulsion of 1492, and the debates on slavery and social reform. When approached within the broader scope of its cultural life, Celestina emerges as a site of mediation between intersecting and conflicting discourses around national identity, sexuality, and ethnicity in an age of imperial expansion, slavery and religious intolerance.

Research Interests

Gender & Sexuality

Race & Ethnicity

Mediterranean and Transoceanic Diasporas

Religion 

Publications

“Rapture and Horror: Reading Celestina in Sixteenth-Century Spain.” Forthcoming, The Routledge Companion to the Iberian Middle Ages: Unity in Diversity. Ed. E. M. Gerli and Ryan D. Giles. New York, London: Routledge, 2021.

“‘Y qué çena es ésta donde my pasyón porfía de mi llevar?’: Espiritualidad conversa y elogio del cristiano nuevo en el banquete de la salvación de Arboleda de los enfermos.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (forthcoming).

“The Likely Origins of The Boxer Codex: Martín de Rada and the Zhigong Tu.” Forthcoming, eHumanista 40 (2018): 117-133.

Teaching

• Spanish 4500 (Special Topics Seminar: Texts Behaving Badly)
• Spanish 3400 (Survey of Spanish Literature I, from the Middle Ages to 1700)
• Spanish 3300 (Text & Interpretation)
• Spanish 3030 (Cultural Conversations)
• Spanish 3010 (Grammar and Composition I)
• Spanish 2020 (Intermediate Spanish II)
• Spanish 2010 (Intermediate Spanish)
• Summer Language Institute 

Recent Presentations

“El cuerpo en pedazos: Violencia, erotismo y fragmentación en las ilustraciones de la Tragicomedia.”First CELPYC Congress (CUNY, New York City, June 3-5). Online presentation. 

Education

Selected Grants & Awards

RBS-UVA Fellowship Project Honorable Mention, University of Virginia, Spring 2019. 

Tibor Wlassics Dante Research Fellowship, University of Virginia, Spring 2019.

Rare Books School-UVA Fellow, Rare Book School, 2018-2019

Buckner W. Clay Fellow, University of Virginia, 2018-2019

Pine Tree Foundation Fellow, Bibliographical Society of America, 2017-2018