91����

Sophia Blea Núñez has research interests in literature and cultural history of the early modern Hispanic world, book history, early modern race and religion, and gender and sexuality studies. They earned their PhD in Spanish and Portuguese from Princeton University and have since held a postdoctoral fellowship at the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute at the University of Southern California and teaching positions at the University of Michigan, Dominican University, Whitman College, and Bucknell University. She has published articles and chapters about the 1587 Inquisition case of Eleno/Elena de Céspedes, an Afro-Hispanic surgeon, soldier, and tailor (among other trades) who articulated a subject position as “neither one nor the other” at the trial for bigamy, disrespect for matrimony, and making a diabolical pact.  

Núñez's book project, Cuerpos de libros: The Corporeality of Books in the Early Modern Hispanic World, argues that ubiquitous metaphors of books as bodies reflected a widespread, underlying understanding of books as bodily, which can and should shape our readings of literary works and understanding of early modern book culture. Calling books bodies in the early modern Hispanic world carried on a tradition of such metaphors while tinging them with social, political, and cultural significance due to the period’s concern with the control of the human body—a concern with control that also extended to “cuerpos de libros” (volumes, but literally bodies of books). Núñez is also working on an article about the saga of captured Arabic books still held at the Real Biblioteca del Escorial and the limits of their 2013 digital repatriation to Morocco.