Dr Alice Brooke

Academic Subject(s): Modern Languages and Joint Schools

Teaching

I teach both Spanish language as well as its associated literature, with a particular focus on the early modern period. In language work, we focus on literary translation of texts from Spanish to English and from English to Spanish. We work on building students’ vocabulary and grammar, as well as their abilities as textual analysts. Students have the chance to engage in a wide range of literary texts, across genres, registers, and styles, as well as the opportunity to explore their own creative writing skills as translators.

For the first year course, I teach two introductory papers in Spanish literature. One introduces students to short prose texts from across the Hispanic world and from a range of periods, including texts by Miguel de Cervantes, Alejo Carpentier, Nellie Campobello, and Ana María Matute. Through these texts, we discuss themes such as language and performance, trauma and historical memory, and the relationship between history and fiction. In the other, students explore a range of poetic and dramatic works, including works by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Garcilaso de la Vega, Federico García Lorca, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. We use these works to explore questions of changing notions of beauty and love, of fate and free will, or of illusion and reality. 

For students in their second and final years, I teach two papers that focus on early modern Spanish literature. Paper VII allows students to explore a range of topics and authors in the literature of the period, including the writings of the Spanish mystics, satirical and burlesque poetry, the development of the love sonnet, and the world of the stage. In Paper X, students focus in-depth on two authors of the period, exploring a wide range of their works, their literary development, and their connection to the society in which they were written.

Research

My research focusses on the literature and culture of the early modern Hispanic world (1500-1700), with a particular interest in religious culture, women’s writing, and the relationship between religious thought and early modern scientific enquiry. My first book explored the presence of empirical ideas in the religious plays by the Mexican poet and nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who was one of the most significant literary figures of colonial New Spain (The autos sacramentales of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Natural Philosophy and Sacramental Theology, OUP, 2018). My second-book length work, a translation and critical edition of Sor Juana’s Crisis sobre un sermón (Critique of a Sermon, 1690) opens up one of her most groundbreaking, yet rarely read works. As the only known published theological critique by an early modern Hispanic woman, it puts into practice what she would later argue in her more famous Respuesta a sor Filotea (1691): that women could, and should, engage in theological study, and that a woman’s well-reasoned argument would defeat any man’s ill-founded and unorthodox thought. The book was awarded an ‘honorable mention’ by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender. I have also published on the role of curiosity in Sor Juana’s Respuesta, on Marian images in her villancicos, on the role of silence in the works of Sor Juana and Teresa of Ávila, and on Golden Age theatre. I am currently working on the poetry of two early modern Carmelite women, Cecilia del Nacimiento and Ana de la Trinidad.