Dr Diana Berruezo-Sanchez
I am an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and a Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow at Universitat de Barcelona. Prior to this, I held a four-year full-time position at the University of Oxford as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and a Career Development Fellow at Balliol College (2017-2021), as well as a two-year lectureship at the sub-faculty of Spanish at the University of Oxford replacing the former King Alfonso XIII Chair of Spanish (2015-2017).
I am exploring an innovative line of research on the black African diaspora in early modern Spain, for which I have been awarded the prestigious Leverhulme and Ramón y Cajal Fellowships. My project investigates the understudied poetry of black men and women who lived in the Iberian Peninsula in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and uncovers unheard pieces of evidence to fill a gap in the field. I look into the socially active diasporic experiences of black women and men that lead to spaces of poetic negotiation. Despite there not being direct references to their lyrics, my research demonstrates that black women and men were part of Spain’s poetic oral traditions. This is what I call the Intangible Poetic Legacy of Black Africans in Early Modern Spain, a space for scholarship to advance the field of black poetic voices in the early modern period.
I am currently working on my next monograph, The Afro-Hispanic Literary Legacy in Early Modern Spain, where I explore in depth the cultural agency of black women and men and the way their presence contributed collectively and anonymously to a myriad of literary texts of the period. I am also crafting an article on the silenced representations of black poets in early modern Spain. I have published a peer-review article on poetic black voices in early modern Spain (‘«Negro poeta debió de ser el que tan negro romance hizo»: ¿poetas negros en el Siglo de Oro?’, Hipogrifo. Revista de literatura y cultura del Siglo de Oro, 9.1 (2021), pp. 131-142).
I am leading an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the African Diaspora for which I was awarded a John Fell Small Grant and organised a research workshop From Presence to Action: Black African’s Agency in Early Modern Spain. In parallel, I am co-leading a research project on invisibilities, Hiding in Plain Sight: The construction of invisibility, funded by the Balliol Interdisciplinary Institute, and bring together scholars of various disciplines such as Mathematics, Philosophy, Astronomy, Literature, and Engineering.
Prior to that, I specialised in the area of early modern Spanish literature, particularly in connection with Italian sources, on which I conducted my PhD thesis and published extensively, for instance, Il Novellino de Masuccio Salernitano y su influencia en la literatura Española de la Edad de Oro (Vigo, Academia del Hispanismo, 2017) and ‘Orality al italico modo in Three Episodes of Don Quixote Part I’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 96-7 (2019), pp.695-709. This line of research allowed me to explore the ways in which literary texts circulate beyond their national borders, creating a network of influences that is key to the understanding of the development of literary traditions.
Most of my publications are fully downloadable in Academia.edu.
Follow me at LinkedIn and visit my network at SR-Seminario de Estudios del Renacimiento
