Murray Edwards College
Huntingdon Road
Cambridge CB3 0DF
Maya Feile Tomes is the Lorna Close Lecturer and Fellow in Spanish at Murray Edwards College and Director of Studies in Modern & Medieval Languages and Linguistics (MMLL) at Peterhouse, where she is also a Bye-Fellow. She joined Murray Edwards in 2021, having previously been Teaching Associate in Colonial Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies here in the Spanish & Portuguese Section, as well as Director of Studies in Spanish & Portuguese at Emmanuel College and a Fellow of Christ's College. Prior to that, she was an undergraduate and graduate student at King's College, Cambridge, where she completed her PhD on New World poetics in the colonial-era Iberian Atlantic context. More broadly her research revolves around the literary culture of the early modern Iberian world, focusing on transatlantic dialogues, multilingual dynamics (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Latin), and classical reception; she also has a special interest in translation. Most recently she has co-edited a volume on Classics in the Early Americas, while a translation of key texts from the 1550s “Controversy of the Indies” by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas is shortly forthcoming with Oxford University Press. She teaches across a variety of papers in the Spanish & Portuguese Section as well as in the Faculty of Classics, and has lived in places from Argentina to Belgium.
Early modern Iberian global literature
Comparative literature
Poetry (esp. epic) and poetics
Colonial studies
Literary culture of the Southern Cone (esp. Argentina)
Classical reception
Selected publications:
Neo-Latin America: the poetics of the ‘New World’ in early modern epic.
Támesis (in preparation). Winner of the 2018-19 Association of Hispanists of Great Britain & Ireland (AHGBI) and Spanish Embassy Publication Prize.
Sepúlveda on the Conquest of the Indies, eds Luke Glanville, David Lupher and Maya Feile Tomes. Oxford University Press (under contract).
Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas, eds Matthew Duquès, Maya Feile Tomes and Adam Goldwyn. Brill (under contract).
‘A lady of letters? Re-reading “Clarinda” in the light of Ovid. Putting the Discurso en loor de la poesía back into the Parnaso Antártico (1608)’ (in preparation).
‘The other arena: poetics goes global in the early modern Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1650+’, in Artes Poeticae: Formations and Transformations 1500-1650, eds Micha Lazarus and Vladimir Brljak (in press).
‘Plurilingual poetry and the hinterland of intertextuality: Europeanising reading culture in the early modern Iberian world’, pp. 227-48 in The Edinburgh History of Reading (vol. 1: Early Readers), ed. Mary Hammond. Edinburgh: EUP (2020).
‘The angel and Ameri(c)a: performing the “New World” in José Manuel Peramás’s De Invento Novo Orbe (1777)’, pp. 121-46 in Changing Hearts: Performing Jesuit Emotions between Europe, Asia and the Americas, eds Yasmin Haskell and Raphaële Garrod. Leiden/Boston: Brill (2019).
‘Südamerika: Die spanischsprachigen Länder’, pp. 920-32 in Der neue Pauly. Das 18. Jahrhundert: Lexikon zur Antikerezeption in Aufklärung und Klassizismus, eds Joachim Jacob and Johannes Süßmann. Stuttgart/Weimar: J. B. Metzler (2018).
