She has previously been employed at the Universities of Warwick and Cardiff, and Goldsmiths, University of London in the UK. Her postgraduate work in Galway (Ireland) and Nottingham (UK) was on comparative literature, relating to the emergence of notions of national and regional identities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
She has three strands of research: early modern studies with a focus on religious painting and its interaction with literary and festal culture; music theatre of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its relationship to the generation and representation of national and regional identities; women’s poetry of the mid-twentieth century in Spain, Portugal, France and the UK and Ireland, with particular reference to echoes of conflict in that work.
She has published on the religious work of the Badajoz painter Luis de Morales (1510-1586) known as El Divino. She has written on the painter and art theorist Vicente Carducho (1585-1638), Florentine-born, naturalised in Madrid, and co-edited a collection of essays on his work with Jeremy Roe (CHAM) and Oliver Noble Wood (Oxford). She also has a strong interest in the work of Josefa de Óbidos and has published an article on her St. Teresa series in Cascais. She has written on festal culture: triumphal entries, funeral exequies and associated poetry by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695), Luis de Góngora (1561-1627), Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645) and the Conde de Villamediana (1582-1622) in early modern Iberia and Spanish America. She has published on representations of Spanish and Portuguese identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century opera and nineteenth-century travel writing on Iberia. She has edited and translated the work of the Spanish poet, Carmen Conde (1907-1996) and published on the Civil War poetry of Conde, Lucia Sánchez Saornil (1895-1970) and the little-known Pilar de Valderrama (1889-1979); and on women’s second world war poetry more generally.
She is currently writing a monograph on Luis de Morales and religious and festal culture in mid-sixteenth century Badajoz, preparing a translation of poems by the Oporto-based Maria Valupi (1905-1977) and developing a project on zarzuela and the end of the Spanish empire in 1898.
