Felipe Valencia

Span 3300: Introduction to Hispanic Literature and Literary Analysis (usually Fall and Spring)
Span 3550: Spanish Culture and Civilization (usually Fall on even years)
Span 3600: Survey of Spanish Literature I: Medieval and Early Modern (usually Spring)
Span 4900: Don Quijote (Spring 2016, Fall 2020, Fall 2025)
Span 4900: Poesía española del Siglo de Oro (Fall 2016, Fall 2019, and Fall 2023)
Span 4900: La melancolía en la literatura española del Siglo de Oro (Fall 2017, Fall 2018)
Span 4900: El Siglo de Oro y el siglo de ahora (Fall 2022, Fall 2026)

I research and teach the literature and intellectual history of early modern Spain, with an emphasis on poetry and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. My secondary field is colonial Latin America and my work also draws from cultural studies, critical theory, and aesthetics. My scholarship studies the gendering of poetics: how the women and men of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Hispanic world forged ways of making and reading poetry thoroughly inflected by early modern understandings of gender and desire. My publications cover sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish lyric and epic poetry, particularly verse by Luis de Góngora, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Fernando de Herrera, Miguel de Cervantes, and Alonso de Ercilla; sixteenth-century political tragedy; theory of the lyric; pastoral; the prose fiction of María de Zayas; and the historiography of the Spanish Golden Age. My articles have appeared in Calíope, Hispanic Review, MLN, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Revista Hispánica Moderna, among others.

Currently I am working on a second single-authored monograph, tentatively titled Luis de Góngora and Gongorism: The Hispanic Sublime, where I pursue two goals: an introduction and a theory. With regards to the first goal, my book will provide an up-to-date, accessible, and authoritative introduction to the poetry of Luis de Góngora (1561–1627), arguably the most consequential poet of the early modern Hispanic world; and to Gongorism, the vast body of verse written, on both sides of the Atlantic, in imitation of Góngora’s distinctive style during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and then by Neo-Baroque writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With regards to the second goal, my book will offer a theory of what is the project that Góngora and his followers have pursued—thus positing a definition of Gongorism that accounts, as opposed to previous ones, for both the early modern and the modern and post-modern followers of Góngora. I argue that Gongorism has pursued a properly Hispanic language of the sublime, an aesthetic concept introduced by the Hellenist rhetorician Longinus in On the Sublime and whose relevance for the study of Gongorism was first posited in 1613 by Pedro de Valencia in a private letter to the poet himself. As a sublime poetic language, Gongorism has sought grandeur and divine horror beyond beauty, it has vulnerated poetic decorum with far-reaching consequences, and it defended the greatness and therefore legitimacy of poetry. Along the way, Gongorism has explored queer and wandering subjectivities, developed a distinctive language of the Hispanic Monarchy, and even claimed for poetry the capacity to articulate truths.

Other projects currently in progress include collaborations and an eventual third monograph. One is a collection of essays, co-edited with Professor Elizabeth Rhodes of Boston College, that addresses sexual violence in early modern Hispanic literature by critiquing the scholarly and pedagogical practices that keep it largely hidden; that examines legal and clinical contexts, both early modern and contemporary, to interpret it; and that offers an annotated anthology of laws and court cases. Three recent articles on rape in the narratives of Zayas and seventeenth-century poetry already work in that direction. Another is, in collaboration with Ricardo Padrón of the University of Virginia, an edited collection of little-known essays by Mary M. Gaylord of Harvard University, including new essays and a long introduction where we situate her remarkable and influential work in the context of early modern Hispanic studies of the last decades. Two other major projects are in early stages of development. The eventual third monograph is tentatively titled The Matter with Angelica: Gender, Ethnicity, and Poetics in Early Modern Spanish Literature, which examines the anxieties surrounding gender, ethnicity, race, nation, and poetics that fair Angelica’s choice of Medoro, a plebeian Moor, raises among Christian knights and poets in a series of Spanish works from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, among them Francisco de Aldana’s “Medoro y Angélica,” Luis Barahona de Soto’s Las lágrimas de Angélica, Lope de Vega’s La hermosura de Angélica, Luis de Góngora’s Romance de Angélica y Medoro, and Miguel de Cervantes’s La Casa de los Celos y selvas de Ardenia and Don Quijote de la Mancha. Two essays already constitute pieces from that eventual third monograph: “Masculinidades enfrentadas en el Romance de Angélica y Medoro (1602) y la Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (1612) de Luis de Góngora,” forthcoming in Les masculinités au Siècle d’Or, edited by Nathalie Dartai-Maranzana and Philippe Rabaté; and “The Perversity of Angelica: On Maritrones, Altisidora, and Rape in Cervantes’s Don Quixote,” forthcoming in Cervantes, Women, and Perversity, edited by Sonia Pérez Villanueva, Leyla Rouhi, and Elizabeth Spragins.

Forthcoming articles and book chapters, currently in production, include “Luis de Góngora” in The Oxford Handbook of Spanish Golden Age Literature, edited by Juan Antonio Garrido Ardila; and the chapter on “Emotions,” in The Bloomsbury Cultural History of Solitude in the Early Modern Age (1450–1700), edited by Andrew Mattison, volume 3 of The Bloomsbury Cultural History of Solitude, edited by Julian Stern. I have also expanded my interest to the intellectual history of the reception of the Spanish Golden Age in contemporary Spain with “The Rape-Revenge Plot as a Reading of María de Zayas and Ana Caro de Mallén in Herminia Luque’s Amar tanta belleza (2015),” forthcoming in Revista Hispánica Moderna; and “El problema de Góngora en La cultura del Barroco de Maravall,” recently out in La cultura del Barroco: Despliegues de un concepto, a special issue of Hispanic Review, edited by Miguel Martínez and Álex Alonso Nogueira.

My first book, The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) contends that at the turn of the seventeenth century, partly as a response to the rising prestige and commercial success of epic, partly enabled by the idea of melancholy—which had gained great importance throughout Europe since the late fifteenth century when it came to think about the physical, ethical, social, and political stakes of creativity—several Spanish poets conceived lyric as a melancholy and masculinist discourse that sings of and perpetrates symbolic violence against the female beloved. The Melancholy Void examines the centrality of gender violence and anxieties about feminization in connection with lyric utterance in influential texts such as Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana (1569–90), Fernando de Herrera’s Algunas obras (1582), and Luis de Góngora’s Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (1612) and Soledades (1613–17), but also in a lesser-known collection of lyric such as Juan de Arguijo’s Versos (1612) and the pastoral romance La Galatea (1585), the first printed work by Miguel de Cervantes. Through the study of these texts, which offer a wide sampling of styles, themes, and traditions, The Melancholy Void addresses four questions in the scholarship of early modern Spanish poetry: what was the response to and contribution from Spanish poetry to the fledgling theory of the lyric in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe, and what consequences did this turn to theory have for Spanish lyric? How did the rise of Spanish epic at that time affect Spanish lyric? What was the impact on Spanish poetry of the heightened interest in melancholy across Europe at the turn of the seventeenth century, so evident in works from other genres, for instance Don Quijote and El médico de su honra? And last, but not least, what was the role of gender violence and the construction of masculinity in key texts of the Spanish poetic tradition, especially in love poetry?

The Melancholy Void has been positively reviewed in Atalanta, Bulletin of the Comediantes, Calíope, Comitatus, Creneida, Hispania, Hispanic Review, Renaissance Quarterly, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Symposium. Reviewers have singled out its effective deployment of gender studies (Brown in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos; Villegas in Creneida; Lloret in Atalanta); its contribution to the understanding of early modern theories of the lyric (Arraiza-Rivera in Symposium; Olmedo Orejuela in Comitatus; Poeta in Hispania); and its potential impact as a major theory of early modern Spanish poetry (Quintero in Hispanic Review; Lloret in Atalanta). As Luis Rodríguez-Rincón writes in Calíope, “The book convincingly demonstrates the links between lyric expression, melancholic subjectivity, and gender violence in early-modern lyric poetry. Its denunciation of gender violence in early-modern poetry helps open the door to necessary but difficult discussions about the harmful legacies of arch-canonical poets and the lyric poetic tradition more generally. The study of early-modern poetry in Spain will no doubt be better off for having the reckoning with gender violence proposed by The Melancholy Void.” Simón Villegas adds in Creneida that “una de las más atrevidas aportaciones intelectuales del libro: la denuncia no ya tan solo de un imaginario machista, sino de una auténtica cultura de la violación en la España altomoderna y, lo que resultaría aún más chocante, en la interpretación y comentario erudito sobre los textos poéticos de esta época por gran parte de la academia moderna y contemporánea a ambos lados del Atlántico.” Ignacio Navarrete has highlighted in BCom how my method, “with its close reading and its emphasis on early modern psychological theory interpreted from a gender perspective, can open up interpretation of many works” beyond poetry. You can listen to an interview on the book in the New Books Network, hosted by Dr. Julia Gossard.

Born in Bogotá to Colombian parents, I belong to the Colombian exiled community and as such I also grew up in Madrid and Washington, DC. I am a proud citizen of Colombia, Spain, and the United States and an immigrant above all. I enjoy reading, watching movies, listening to music, biking, hiking, and travel.

If you are an independent scholar or your institution does not grant you access to any publications of mine that you wish to consult, please write to felipe.valencia@usu.edu and I will gladly share them with you. / Si usted investiga por su cuenta o la institución a la que pertenece no tiene acceso a publicaciones mías que desee consultar, escríbame por favor a felipe.valencia@usu.edu y con gusto se las proporciono.

Monograph in a peer-reviewed academic press

The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora. University of Nebraska Press, 2021.

Reviews of The Melancholy Void in academic journals:

Articles in peer-reviewed academic journals

“El problema de Góngora en La cultura del Barroco de Maravall.” La cultura del Barroco: despliegues de un concepto, special issue of Hispanic Review, edited by Miguel Martínez and Álex Alonso Nogueira, vol. 93, no. 3, 2025, pp. 325–46.

“‘Queda sin gloria… /tu fábula’: On the Myth of Apollo and Daphne and the Meaning of Love in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Poetry.” Modern Language Notes, vol. 139, no. 2, 2024, pp. 213–31.

“Melancholy, Rape, and the Gendering of Poetics in Zayas’s Desengaños.” Medicine, Gender, and Sexuality in Hispanic Literature and Culture, special issue of eHumanista, edited by Luis F. López González, vol. 59, pp. 14–31.

“Rape Culture and Zayas’s Fiction.” Teaching the Female, special issue of La corónica, edited by Simone Pinet, vol. 51, no. 1, 2022, pp. 71–80.

Choi, Imogen, and Felipe Valencia. “The Tragedy of Women in Power: La Araucana and Sixteenth-Century Neo-Senecan Theatre.” La Araucana (1569–2019), special issue of Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, edited by Emiro Martínez-Osorio and Paul Firbas, vol. 45, no. 1, 2020, pp. 63–92

“Sincerity, Fiction, and the Space of Lyric in the Silerio Episode of La Galatea (1585) by Miguel de Cervantes.” Hispanic Review, vol. 88, no. 2, 2020, pp. 111–32.

“The Female Body of Sor Juana’s Subject and the Language of Gongorism in Epinicio al virrey conde de Galve (1691).” El autor en la modernidad, special issue of Theory Now, edited by Emre Özmen and Tania Padilla, vol. 2, no. 1, 2019, pp. 103–19.

“‘Amorosa violencia’: Sor Juana’s Theory of the Lyric.” Sor Juana y su lírica menor, special issue of Romance Notes, edited by Francisco Ramírez Santacruz, vol. 58, no. 2, 2018, pp. 299–310.

“Furor, industria y límites de la palabra poética en La Numancia (1585) de Cervantes.” El teatro profano del siglo XVI, special issue of Criticón, edited by Julio Vélez-Sainz, vol. 126, 2016, pp. 97–110.

“‘No se puede reducir a continuado término’: Cervantes and the Poetic Persona.” Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, vol. 21, no. 1, 2016, pp. 81–106.

“Las ‘muchas (aunque bárbaras)’ voces líricas de La Araucana y la índole poética de una ‘historia verdadera.’” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, vol. 49, no. 1, 2015, pp. 147–71.

“‘Acoged blandamente mi suspiro’: El beso de almas en la poesía petrarquista española del siglo XVI.” Dicenda: Cuadernos de Filología Hispánica, vol. 26, 2008, pp. 259–90.

Forthcoming article in peer-reviewed academic journal

“The Rape-Revenge Plot as a Reading of María de Zayas and Ana Caro de Mallén in Herminia Luque’s Amar tanta belleza (2015).” Revista Hispánica Moderna, accepted.

Pending chapters under peer review in academic presses by expected date of publication

“The Perversity of Angelica: On Maritornes, Altisidora, and Sexual Assault in Cervantes’s Don Quixote.” Cervantes, Women, and Perversity, edited by Sonia Pérez-Villanueva, Leyla Rouhi, and Elizabeth Spragins, Palgrave Macmillan, accepted.

“Luis de Góngora.” The Oxford Handbook of Spanish Golden Age Literature, edited by Juan Antonio Garrido Ardila, Oxford UP, forthcoming.

“Emotions.” The Bloomsbury Cultural History of Solitude in the Early Modern Age (1450–1700), edited by Andrew Mattison, volume 3 of The Bloomsbury Cultural History of Solitude, edited by Julian Stern, Bloomsbury, forthcoming.

“‘Ambicïoso Oriente se despoja’: Estilo sublime y materialidad indiana en el Panegírico al duque de Lerma (1617) de Luis de Góngora.” Apollon(e) musagète : Mélanges offerts à Mercedes Blanco. Poésie, histoire, textes et images au Siècle d’or, edited by Roland Béhar, Jesús Ponce Cárdenas, and Maria Zerari, Classiques Garnier, forthcoming.

“Masculinidades enfrentadas en el Romance de Angélica y Medoro (1602) y la Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (1612) de Luis de Góngora.” Las Masculinidades en las letras áureas españolas (siglos XVI y XVII), edited by Nathalie Dartai-Maranzana and Philippe Rabaté, Classiques Garnier, 2026, pp. 321–43.

Book reviews in academic journals (12)

Review of “En voz de pluma”: Poéticas de la escritura en la lírica áurea, by Antonio J. Arraiza-Rivera. Atalanta: Revista de Letras Barrocas, vol. 12, no. 2, 2024, pp. 306–10.

Review of A Poetry of Things: The Material Lyric in Habsburg Spain, by Mary E. Barnard. Hispanic Review, vol. 91, no. 3, 2023, pp. 475–79.

Review of Hispanic Baroque Ekphrasis: Góngora, Camargo, Sor Juana, by Luis Castellví Laukamp. Colonial Latin American Review, vol. 31, no. 3, 2022, pp. 463–65.

Review of Conversaciones en verso: La epístola ética del Renacimiento y la construcción del yo poético, by Clara Marías. MLN, vol. 137, no. 2, 2022, pp. 385–87.

Review of Goodbye Eros: Recasting Forms and Norms of Love in the Age of Cervantes, edited by Ana María Laguna and John Beusterien. Calíope, vol. 26, no. 2, 2021, pp. 407–10.

Review of The Potency of Pastoral in the Hispanic Baroque, by Anne Holloway. Bulletin of the Comediantes, vol. 72, no. 1, 2020, pp. 157–59.

Review of Love in the Poetry of Francisco de Aldana: Beyond Neoplatonism, by Paul Joseph Lennon. Creneida: Anuario de Literaturas Hispánicas, vol. 8, 2020, pp. 353–58.

Review of Poesía y materialidad, edited by Albert Lloret and Miguel Martínez. Ecdotica, vol. 16, 2019, pp. 285–91.

Review of Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of Renaissance Europe, by Mary E. Barnard. Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, vol. 71, no. 2, 2017, pp. 108–11.

Review of Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire, by Isabel Torres. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, vol. 48, no. 3, 2014, pp. 43–46.

Review of Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities, by David R. Castillo, and Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought, by Christopher D. Johnson. Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, vol. 18, no. 3, 2013, pp. 165–70.

Review of An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain, by Adrienne Laskier Martín. Dicenda: Cuadernos de Filología Hispánica, vol. 29, 2011, pp. 331–33.

My teaching encompasses introductory courses to the Spanish major and minor, surveys, and advanced courses on special topics. I have also taught literature courses in English (on Don Quijote and on colonial Latin American texts in a Native American and European context) and courses throughout the language sequence in a liberal-arts setting. At Utah State, practically every semester I teach a section of our introduction to Hispanic literature and literary analysis for Spanish majors and minors, and every spring I offer a survey of medieval and early modern Spanish literature, which in recent years has been focused on gender. In the fall I usually teach, every other year, an introduction to Spanish culture, centered on 20^th-century Spanish modernity and the Civil War; and, every year, an advanced topics course. Topics have included:

Cervantes’s Don Quijote, where we read the book in full and place it in its historical and literary context while also looking ahead to the theory of the novel.
Melancholy in early modern Spanish literature, where we combine readings in the fascinating tradition on melancholy (from the Pseudo-Aristotle to Freud, including Cicero, John Cassian, Ficino, Huarte de San Juan, Agamben, and Schiesari) and early modern Spanish plays and novellas, such as Lope’s El caballero de Olmedo, Calderón’s La vida es sueño and El medico de su honra, Zayas’s “La inocencia castigada” and “Estragos que causa el vicio,” and Tirso’s El condenado por desconfiado, among others.
Early modern Spanish poetry, where we take deep dives into some of the most beautiful verse in Spanish: cancionero poetry, the lyric of Garcilaso, the mystical canticle of San Juan de la Cruz, poetry written by women in the seventeenth century, and the verse of Luis de Góngora.
Dialogues between twenty-first-century Spain (el siglo de ahora) and the Spanish Golden Age (el Siglo de Oro), where we combine Velázquez’s Las meninas and Santiago García and Javier Olivares’s graphic novel of the same name, Cervantes’s Rinconete y Cortadillo and Alberto Rodríguez and Rafael Cobos’s TV show La peste, or the Inquisitorial trial of Eleno de Céspedes and genderqueer artists Cabello/Carceller’s mixed media project Un presente sin memoria: A/O (Caso Céspedes).

Moderator, Artepaño: Chicano Prisoner Kerchief Art Film Screening + Conversation, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, 7 September 2024.
Interviewee, podcast on The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora, hosted by Dr. Julia Gossard, New Books Network, 5 June 2023.
Co-creator, Managing Editor, and Technical Director, Cancionero de abril y mayo, Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, April and May 2020 and April 2021.
Participant, “#MeToo Continues: Where Are We Post-Kavanaugh/Post-Election?,” town hall discussion moderated by Tom Williams, organized by Utah Public Radio, Logan, UT, 25 January 2019.
Participant, “Supreme Stakes: Understanding Sexual Violence,” radio broadcast on Access Utah, hosted by Tom Williams, Utah Public Radio, 9 October 2018.

Felipe Valencia

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