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Romance Studies Faculty

Chair

Ellen Nerenberg

Professor of Romance Languages & LiteraturesShow Bio and Photo

Faculty

Michael Armstrong Roche

Associate Professor of Romance Languages & LiteraturesShow Bio and Photo

Associate Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures
300 High Street 206
860-685-3128

Associate Professor, Medieval Studies
860-685-3128

marmstrong@wesleyan.edu

BA Harvard University
MA Harvard University
PHD Harvard University

Office Hours:
Spring, 2011: Wednesdays 4:15-5:15pm, Fridays 12:00-1:00pm or by appointment

Research Interests:
My recent scholarship has been focused primarily on what are often called Cervantes's "other works," those relatively neglected novels (La Galatea, Persiles), novellas, and plays that tend to get overlooked in the long shadow cast by Don Quijote. A book called Cervantes' Epic Novel: Empire, Religion, and the Dream Life of Heroes in 'Persiles' (U of Toronto P, 2009) reads Cervantes's final novel in several contexts: it links Persiles's narrative art to the major political, religious, social, and literary debates of late 16th- and early 17th-century Spain, as well as to the verse and prose epic traditions represented primarily by Homer, Vergil, Heliodorus, and Tasso. In that book I set out to show that Persiles is epic not only in its formal and ideological ambition but also in its aspiration to embrace all of the author himself--including the overriding desire to entertain. For several years now I have been at work on a book provisionally entitled Cervantes Plays: Ironies of History on the Early Modern Stage. It takes a close look at Cervantes's full-length plays and their imaginative, often experimental, and still-compelling dramatic engagement with key historical debates about Habsburg political mythmaking, Algerian captivity, the gypsy community, the rise of the commercial stage, marriage choice, and women's work. This book has emerged from the Theater Without Borders research collaborative, a group committed to exploring the international and comparative impact of early modern drama, especially--but not exclusively--of England, Spain, Italy, and France (see our website at www.nyu.edu/projects/theaterwithoutborders/index.html). Earlier I was contributing author to the scholarly catalogue that accompanied an exhibition I helped organize called Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, which could be seen at the Prado, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum in NYC (1988-1989). Throughout, I have tried to practice a kind of scholarship that moves fluidly from text to context and back again (reading the text with and against the pressures of the moment and then reading that moment through the lens of the text); that draws on close reading in multiple disciplines (history of literature and art, comparative literature, genre theory, political, social, and economic history, history of ideas and philosophy, theology and religious history, and jurisprudence); and that is informed by textual, historical, and theoretical approaches to literature. Finally, I have looked for ways to bring my scholarly interests to a wider audience, serving--for instance--as general editor of three Let's Go travel guides (Let's Go France 1986, Let's Go California and the Pacific Northwest 1986, and Let's Go Spain & Portugal 1992).

Scholarly Keywords:
Cervantes; Spanish classical theater; Spanish and Latin American poetry; medieval and early modern Spanish literature and history (including Latin American colonial, transatlantic, and global perspectives); comparative literature and history (classical, medieval, and early modern European primarily); 16th- and 17th-century New World conquest texts (chronicle and history, jurisprudence, ethnography); Goya