Bio

Simón Villegas holds a B.A. with distinction in Hispanic Philology from the Universidad de Antioquia and a M.A. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he is currently completing his doctoral dissertation. His main research interests are medieval and early modern Iberian literatures and cultures, critical theory, and textual scholarship. His work has appeared in Lingüística y Literatura, Medievalia, La Corónica, and Calíope. His dissertation project focuses on the intersections between race, gender, and religion in the Iberian and colonial Hispanic American epic poetry from the late sixteenth century.

Project

"Historizing the (Literary) Moor: Limits, Problems, and Futures of Maurophilia in Early Modern Iberian Studies".

Since Georges Cirot’s series of essays (1938-1944), the term “maurophilia” has entered the discursive practices of early modern Iberianism. Its questions and methodologies, and the problems regarding the interpretation of its literary and cultural sources, remain however far from settled. The purpose of this project is to consider the implications and possibilities, as well as the limits, of maurophilia as a hermeneutical and historical tool, and to put them in dialogue with a more ample and urgently “modern” theoretical framework, that of race studies. Simón Villegas aims to demonstrate the relevance behind discussing this term and what it entails (and curtails) in our understanding of a deeply intricate period such as the late sixteenth-century Habsburg Iberia.