Elizabeth Wright

I am a scholar of the literature and culture of Spanish early modernity. My publications ponder the diverse writing practices with which people and communities grappled with expanded geographic and cultural horizons that came into view as a result of transatlantic navigation and empire building. I also serve as editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes. 

My publications include The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance (University of Toronto Press). In a book in progress, Iberia's Atlantic Households: Slavery and Diaspora in the Age of Empire (1444-1640), I ask how rulers, church leaders, and regular citizens became complicit in a mode of human trafficking that was contrary to religious tenets and age-old labor practices. See a piece from my introductory chapter in this collaborative volume on the Trajectories of Empire (Vanderbilt University Press).

Earlier, I cast new light on the writing career of Europe’s first literary celebrity, the poet-and-playwright Lope de Vega (Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III). In turn, I prepared a critical edition of Lope’s inventive news play, Los ramilletes de Madrid (in Parte XI de las Comedias de Lope de Vega, vol. 1 of 2, Gredos, 2012; forthcoming as a revised online edition. I also examined how a mestizo priest descended from Aztec royalty reinterpreted Spanish theater by Lope and other major Golden Age playwrights in collaboration with Louise Burkhart and Barry Sell, yielding Spanish Golden-Age Drama in Mexican Translation, Nahuatl Theater Set, vol. 3, University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. For another collaboration, I translated and edited Latin poetry that circulated around the world in the wake of the Battle of Lepanto, as co-editor with Sarah Spence and Andrew Lemons, for The Battle of Lepanto, I Tatti Renaissance Library of Harvard University Press.

I have secured grants from the John Carter Brown Library; the Newberry Library; the American Philosophical Society; the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH); the Renaissance Society of America; the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center; the Fulbright; the Mellon Global Georgia Project of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts; and the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University. My awards at UGA include the Distinguished Research Professor, Creative Research Medal, and the Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award from the Office of Research, as well as the M. G. Michael Award from the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

In teaching and mentoring, I help students immerse themselves in Spanish language and cultures, while also devising research and writing projects that draw on the riches of UGA’s libraries and other campus resources.