Thursday, Feb 27, 2025
12:45PM to 2:00PM
HQ 532
In our fourth entry of our new Neighbor Lunches series, we will be catching up with Julia C. Hernández, one of our new Beinecke curators, specializing in early modern period in the Spanish-speaking world.
The early modern Spanish theatre genre known as comedia nueva fused popular and elite entertainment, drawing spectators from every level of society into the raucous world of the outdoor corral stage. Composed and performed across the Spanish speaking globe, comedia offered playwrights and actors a performative space to explore the boundaries of power and identity, not only for elite Peninsular men, but also for women, Indigenous, criollo, and Black comediantes in the Atlantic and Pacific spheres. But comedias were not merely blockbusters, they were also bestsellers, with the burgeoning commercial print market circulating plays far beyond the stage. This hands-on presentation will introduce the dynamic world of the comedia suelta, the unbound printed format in which many of these plays reached the hands of readers at every level of early modern society, from Madrid to Mexico City to Manila. We will consider the suelta, a visually striking, affordable-at-any-budget, and infinitely collectable medium, as a printed artifact unique to global Iberia. Students will learn about the rich vistas sueltas open for researching the complexities of the early modern world, and instructors will learn how to incorporate the 1168 (and counting!) sueltas of Yale’s collections into their teaching at any level. You’ll also have the chance to try your own hand at suelta-making with both traditional and digital tools!
Julia C. Hernández is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work bridges the fields of classics and Hispanic studies. With training in both areas, she specializes in the history of ancient Greek—from its teaching to its translation—in the early modern Spanish-speaking world. Both her teaching and research explore the intersections of classics, early modernity, and U.S. Latinx identity through the lens of book history. Julia began her post as curator at the Beinecke Library having served most recently as Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at New York University. She has taught the legacy of the early modern book to a diverse range of undergraduates, with an emphasis on student-curated exhibitions and other project-based learning. Julia also serves as associate editor of the international early modern Spanish theater journal Bulletin of the Comediantes and is a co-founder of the international scholarly society Hesperides: Classics in the Luso-Hispanic World.