Carlos Iglesias-Crespo works on the interface between the literature, thought, and politics of early modern Spain and its wider European and colonial world. His scholarship centres on the co-constitutive links between poetry and the period’s epistemological frameworks, the cultural politics of empire, the embodied experience of war and violence, and the intellectual world of Renaissance humanism.
He is currently working on two book projects. The first one, entitled Memory on the Line: Petrarchan Poetry, Intellectual Change, and Imperial Identity in Early Modern Spain, maps the evolving intersections between the period’s theories of memory and the poetics of Petrarchism. Focusing on the work of Juan Boscán (ca. 1488-1542), Fernando de Herrera (1534-1597), and Juan de Jáuregui (1583-1641), the book will shed light on how these elite poets seized on this shifting synergy to intervene in key intellectual, social, and political transformations at the very heart of the first global empire. His second book project is provisionally entitled Suffering for Empire: The Veteran Poetics of Disability in the Early Modern Hispanic World. This project aims to illuminate how early modern veterans used literature to negotiate the embodied trauma of war and the performance of disability across the global theatre of operations of the Spanish Empire during the reign of Philip II.
Carlos holds undergraduate degrees in Classics and Spanish Philology from the Universidad de Extremadura and earned his MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge. He joined Christ’s as Junior Research Fellow after a lectureship at the University of Oxford. His work has been supported by the “La Caixa” Foundation, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Cambridge Trust.
Selected Publications:
'Fernando de Herrera y Luís de Camões: polémica y política en torno a la Elegía I (<i>Algunas obras</i>, 1582)', Revista de Filología Española (Forthcoming)
'La inteligencia kinésica de Garcilaso: una retórica del cuerpo en los sonetos XXIII y XIII (entre erotismo y violencia)', in Horizontes de la historia del cuerpo en las literaturas y culturas iberoamericanas: nuevas perspectivas de la Edad Media al presente, ed. by Carlos Iglesias-Crespo y Sergio Martínez Rey (Madrid: Sílex, 2025), pp. 139-181
'A Cognitive Poetics of Wonder: The Synthesis of Aristotelian Rhetoric, Grammar, and Psychology in Fernando de Herrera’s Anotaciones', Journal for the History of Rhetoric, 27.1 (2024): 47-69 https://doi.org/10.5325/jhistrhetoric.27.1.0047
'A la sombra de Salustio y Lucrecio: la translatio imperii et studii como estrategia de promoción en el prólogo de Francisco de Medina a las Anotaciones de Fernando de Herrera', Calíope 28.1 (2023): 59-77 https://doi.org/10.5325/caliope.28.1.0059
'Energeia as Defamiliarization: Reading Aristotle with Shklovsky’s Eyes', Journal for the History of Rhetoric, 24.3 (2021): 274-289 https://doi.org/10.1080/26878003.2021.1975465
