΢ƽ

Professor Núñez in a tweed suit, standing in front of a gray metal wall
Contact
Phone
641-269-3263
Address

1226 Park Street
HSSC N2138
΢ƽ, IA 50112
United States

Sophia Núñez

Assistant Professor
Offices, Departments, or Centers: Spanish ,

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.  

Education and Degrees

PhD, Princeton University 

BA, Washington University in St. Louis

Selected Publications

“Beyond ‘this Line’: Visualizing Eleno de Céspedes.” The Routledge Companion to Race in Early Modern Artistic, Material, and Visual Production, edited by Nicholas R. Jones, Christina Lee, and Dominique Polanco, Routledge, 2025.
 
“‘No era lo vno ny lo otro’: la familia queer, la escritura del cuerpo y la vida neutra en el caso Céspedes (siglo XVI).” Drag Kings: arqueología crítica de masculinidades espectaculares en Latinx America, edited by Javier Guerrero and Nathalie Bouzaglo, Metales Pesados, 2025, pp. 100-119. JSTOR, .
 
“Work and Identity in the Case of Elena/o de Céspedes.” Slave Subjectivities in the Iberian Worlds (16th-20th centuries), edited by Ângela Barreto Xavier, Cristina Nogueira de Silva and Michel Cahen, Brill, 2023, pp. 101-116. Studies in Global Slavery 15. Brill, .
 
“‘No ay quien los quiera’: Vida cotidiana de Elena o Eleno de Céspedes y María del Caño a través de sus inventarios de bienes.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, vol. 23, no. 4, 24 November 2022, pp. 393–409. Taylor & Francis Online, .
 

We use cookies to enable essential services and functionality on our site, enhance your user experience, provide better service through personalized content, collect data on how visitors interact with our site, and enable advertising services.

To accept the use of cookies and continue on to the site, click "I Agree." For more information about our use of cookies and how to opt out, please refer to our website privacy policy.