Bio

Paulina León is a Visiting Assistant Professor at New York University where she researches and teaches on the cultural and literary histories of early modern Spain and colonial Latin America. Her research explores the cultural dimensions of disease and public health systems. Her current book project examines how early modern epidemic outbreaks fundamentally galvanized the purposes of literature and its circuits of production, distribution, and consumption across the empire. Her research has been supported by the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago, the Renaissance Society of America, the Newberry Library, the Biblioteca Historicomèdica “Vicent Peset Llorca” at the Universitat de València, and the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry.

Project

The title of the paper Paulina León will give in Faberllull will be "Miquel Parets and the Politics of Care in Seventeenth-Century Barcelona." Over nearly 35 years of chronicling, only one event disrupts the generic conventions and material composition of Miquel Parets’s Dietari: the bubonic plague outbreak that struck Barcelona in 1651. In this two-volume work, the plague appears both in the main text—focused on recording urban and political affairs in Barcelona and Catalonia—and in the endnotes where the artisan documented matters related to his guild and family. Her intervention examines how the collapse between the public and the private in Parets’s Dietari reflects a shift in the politics of care, which Parets interprets as an ethic and form of kinship were writing plays a central role.