EFL Welcomes New Spanish Professor Marta Albalá Pelegrín

October 2014. Marta Albalá Pelegrín joins the department beginning in Fall 2014 as an Assistant Professor of Spanish. Marta, who specializes in the literature and theater of Early Modern Spain (1500-1800), will teach courses in her area as well as survey courses in Spanish Peninsular Literature and Spanish Civilization. Marta holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures from The Graduate Center (CUNY), as well as B.A.s from the University of Zaragoza and the University of Salamanca (including a year spent at the University of Paris VII).

Her research and teaching interests include the formation of fifteenth and sixteenth century "comedia" within the context of Iberian and Mediterranean exchanges, the continuities and discontinuities among Spanish, Italian, French, and English Early Modern Drama, the textual formation of Spanish political and Cultural Networks, the impact of Spanish and Italian diplomatic relationships at the Roman curia in Golden Age Spanish literature, and the visual reconstruction of a performance history of Early Modern Theater. She has published articles in well-regarded professional journals such as Bulletin of Spanish Studies, and has recently completed a chapter for the edited volume Exile and the Formation of Religious Identities in the Early Modern World (1500-1800) (2014). She has received fellowships and grants from the Folger Shakespeare Library and McGill University to participate in interdisciplinary workshops and seminars on English Early Modern Drama and the creation of Early Modern "publics". She is now working on her book manuscript: Entertaining the Pope: International Diplomacy and Communities in Western Mediterranean Plays (1470-1530). Future projects include a series on the eighteenth century English translator Captain Stevens, and his translations of Spanish Early Modern bestsellers as a site in which to voice Catholic and minority religious ideas.