Participant Info

First Name
Esther M.
Last Name
Villegas de la Torre
Country
United Kingdom
State
Affiliation
Universitat Pompeu Fabra / University College London
Website URL
https://www.respublicalitteraria.com/
Keywords
Fifteenth-, Sixteenth-, and Seventeenth-Century Cultural and Intellectual History, Female Authorship, Critical Theory, Gender Studies, Comparative and Transnational Approaches.
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I am a cultural historian specializing in women’s contributions to the early modern learned and literary world, from an interdisciplinary, comparative stance. My doctoral thesis, ‘Women and the Republic of Letters in the Luso-Hispanic World, 1447-1700’ (Nottingham, 2012) sought to correct the gender imbalance in Luso-Hispanic book history by charting, chiefly through a study of paratexts, the rise and consolidation of the image and position of learned women as authors, in Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish, within the Respública litteraria in the Spanish empire 1447–1700, with parallels from England, France and Italy. In February 2019, I was awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship to revisit women’s contributions via print to the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters, with a focus on publishing strategies in scholarly and commercial print works in Anglo and Hispanic contexts. At present, I am an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London, preparing a monograph (under contract with Brill) based on my MSCA action. Please visit my personal website for more information.

Recent Publications

Villegas de la Torre, Esther M. 2009. “Transatlantic Interactions: Seventeenth-Century Women Authors and Literary Self-Consciousness”, in Claire Taylor (ed.), Identity, Nation, Discourse: Latin American Women Writers and Artists (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars), pp. 104-21.

Villegas de la Torre, Esther M. 2012. “Tragicomedia los jardines y campos sabeos (Enríquez de Guzmán, Feliciana): Préface”, Les Idées du Théâtre (IDT), (URL http://www.idt.paris-sorbonne.fr/corpus/details.php?table_name=idt&function=details&where_field=id&where_value=209) (Accessed 4 April 2012).

Villegas de la Torre, Esther M. 2013. “Tragicomedia los jardines y campos sabeos (Enríquez de Guzmán, Feliciana): Prologue”, Les Idées du Théâtre (IDT), (URL http://www.idt.paris-sorbonne.fr/corpus/details.php?table_name=idt&function=details&where_field=id&where_value=208) (Accessed 24 March 2013).

Villegas de la Torre, Esther M. 2017. “Writing Literature for Publication, 1605-1637”, in Alexander S. Wilkinson & Alejandra Ulla Lorenzo (eds.), A Maturing Market: The Iberian Book World in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill), pp. 124-40.

Villegas de la Torre, Esther M. 2018. “Tratado philosophi-poetico escotico, compuesto en siguidillas (María de Camporredondo): paratextos”, BIESES: Bibliografía de Escritoras Españolas, (URL https://www.bieses.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Camporredondo_Tratado_1758.pdf) (Accessed 25 November 2018).

Villegas de la Torre, Esther M. 2019a. “Autoría femenina y campo literario en la primera mitad del siglo XVII”, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14636204.2019.1689681.

Villegas de la Torre, Esther M. 2019b. “Gender in Early Constructions of Authorship, 1447-1518”, Theory Now: Journal of Literature, Critique and Thought, 2, 1: 33-50.

Villegas de la Torre, Esther M. (ed., intro., and trans.). 2020. El canto de la décima Musa: Poesías del Renacimiento y el Barroco (Barcelona: Austral).

Villegas de la Torre, Esther M. 2021a. “Décima moradora del Parnaso: Género y tolerancia en la República literaria de la primera modernidad”, in Ricardo García Cárcel and Eliseo Serrano Martín (eds.), Historia de la tolerancia en España (Madrid: Cátedra), pp. 171-83.

Villegas de la Torre, Esther M. 2021b. “Erudición y lucro en la República literaria barroca: a propósito de María de Zayas”, Criticón, 143: 157-175.

Villegas de la Torre, Esther M. 2022. “Scholarly Identity and Gender in the Respublica litteraria: The Cases of Luisa Sigea (1522-1560) and Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673)”, in Scholten, Koen – van Miert, Dirk – Karl A.E. Enenkel (eds.), Memory and Identity in the Learned World: Community Formation in the Early Modern World of Learning and Science (Leiden – Boston: Brill), pp. 117-155.

Villegas de la Torre, Esther M. (forthcoming). “‘Todos nos incitamos al estudio por codicia de la gloria’: modelos, prácticas y género en el Bajo Barroco”, in Rodríguez Ortega, D. and A. Vara López (eds.), Autoras y promotoras literarias en la Edad Moderna (Lausanne – Navarra: Peter Lang – Universidad Pública de Navarra).

Media Coverage
Country Focus
Iberian Peninsula (main), England (main), France (secondary), Italy (secondary), and Mexico (main).
Expertise by Geography
Central America, England, France, Spain, Western Europe
Expertise by Chronology
Medieval, Pre-17th century, 17th century, Early Modern
Expertise by Topic
Book History, Gender, Literary History, Material Culture, Women