Distinguished Research Professor 2020

Elizabeth Wright, professor of Spanish, is an internationally recognized scholar of Spanish “Golden Age” literature and culture. With more than two decades of energetic, influential and innovative scholarship, she has cast a new light on how Spanish empire building after 1492 transformed the writing practices and literary genres with which individuals and communities made sense of a rapidly changing world. Her current book project, Stages of Servitude: Scenes from the Atlantic Slave Trade, examines how slave trafficking was made socially and economically acceptable in the Spanish world even as rulers and the public acknowledged its cruelty and illegality. But the study also explores how both enslaved and free blacks negotiated economic advancement and even claimed artistic validation. She is also editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes, the premier scholarly journal devoted to the study of Spain’s Golden Age theater and 2019 winner for Best Journal Design given by the Council for Editors of Learned Journals.

Previous Awards

• Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award 2019
• Creative Research Medal 2017