About

Marina Brownlee is the Robert Schirmer Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She serves as the Chair of the Committee for Renaissance Studies. Her academic background includes a B.A. in Hispanic Studies from Smith College and a Ph.D. in Romance Languages from Princeton. Prior to joining Princeton in 2002, she taught at Dartmouth College and the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on medieval and early modern literature and theory, with particular interests in representations of gender, cultural and linguistic translation, the senses, and curiosity within the context of the Medieval and Early Modern periods. She has authored several books, including 'The Cultural Labyrinth of María de Zayas,' 'The Severed Word: Ovid’s ‘Heroides’ and the ‘Novela Sentimental,’' 'The Status of the Reading Subject in the ‘Libro de Buen Amor,’' and 'The Poetics of Literary Theory in Lope and Cervantes.' Currently, she is working on a monograph about curiosity and modernity in Early Modern Spain. In addition to her writing, she has edited a special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies titled 'Intricate Alliances: Early Modern Spain and England' and is preparing an edited volume on Cervantes’ ‘Persiles’ with the University of Toronto Press. Her editorial activities include co-editing four volumes on Medieval and Early Modern topics, most recently 'Renaissance Encounters. Greek East and Latin West,' which explores cultural interactions between Byzantium and the Western Middle Ages. She actively organizes international workshops at Princeton, with recent focus on 'Space and Place in Medieval Iberia.'

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art history
• Art
• Psychology
• Classics
• Literature
• Philosophy
• History
• Linguistics
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Introduction

  Humanities · 2025-11-17

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Curiosity and Modernity offer an inevitable pairing [...]

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Death and Dismemberment in Zayas’s World

  2024-02-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Revealing New Perspectives

  2022

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Literature
  • Art

  This volume of studies in honor of Stephen G. Nichols by colleagues, friends, and students is called Revealing New Perspectives because that is what his career exemplifies. As both the verb and adjective forms suggest, Steve has undeniably changed the course of medieval studies in ways which have had a global impact that continues to be profound. He has always been committed to not only contextualizing the intellectual and artistic production of the past in which a work was created, but to considering it also according to the current theoretical optics of our time, since each age has its own set of aesthetic and cultural realities and expectations. The contributions to this volume by sixteen distinguished medievalists are divided into the five sections of "Visuals," "Lyric," "Philology," "Alterity," and "Rewritings." While it can, of course, be argued that each essay partakes of more than one of these categories, they have been globally organized into the category that predominates in their articulation. *** "The breadth of topic and learning in this celebratory volume are a fitting tribute to the remarkable Stephen Nichols. It would be difficult to imagine a more distinguished international array of colleagues, all writing in warm admiration of Nichols’s pioneering influence in manuscript studies, the visual arts, narrative, drama, and lyric in Italian, Iberian, German, Byzantine Greek, and Middle English as well as French. Kevin Brownlee and Marina S. Brownlee have assembled a vital testament to the ‘pathos and passion of philology’ in its most contemporary and medieval senses." —Ardis Butterfield, John M. Schiff Professor of English; Professor of French and of Music, Yale University *** "Revealing New Perspectives is a fitting tribute to the pioneering scholarship and ongoing innovation of Stephen Nichols. A volume that includes the fruit of long-standing reflections by some of today’s most eminent medievalists and exciting new work by a number of Nichols’ former students, Revealing New Perspectives offers rich reading for established scholars, and accessible pathways for students to some of medieval studies’ most compelling current issues, including the opportunities for investigation opened up by new technologies and the insights to be gained from engaging with the specificity and complex situatedness of each medieval work." —Daisy Delogu, Professor of French, University of Chicago *** "The first thing one notices upon perusing this book is the extraordinary list of contributors, a line-up that befits a celebration of Stephen G. Nichols’s impact on medieval studies. These engaging essays reflect the innovativeness and interdisciplinarity of their honoree’s approach, and, in keeping with the spirit of Nichols’s own work, open up intriguing possibilities for further exploration." —Geri L. Smith, Professor of French and Chair, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Central Florida *** "To honor medievalist and comparatist Stephen G. Nichols, this beautifully illustrated book assembles a roll call of skilled literary critics and historians from across the globe. In five sections, sixteen essays probe texts and topics in English, French, German, Iberian, Italian, and Occitan, from the Middle Ages through the mid-twentieth century. The striking breadth and depth—methodological, linguistic, and chronological—pay fitting tribute to Nichols, whose long and distinguished career has stretched the study of medieval poetry through the creation and application of (just for example) material and digital philology." —Jan M. Ziolkowski, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin, Harvard University

  PublisherDOI

• Spain

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-08-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  To speak about ‘literary beginnings’ we need to acknowledge the range of texts considered ‘literary’. These are imaginative works that can be classified variously by: the medium in which they were composed (orally or in writing), their place of origin, historical time frame of their composition, subject of the composition, and/or the genre to which they belong. The twenty-first-century present from which we are pondering medieval literature is particularly exciting because it includes not only canonical texts as well as non-canonical ones, but also the systematic scrutiny of marginalia and such forms as literary fragments – some accidental, others by design. If beginnings represent originality and innovation in the context of already extant material, where do we start a literary history of medieval Spain? With the Arab invasion of 711 and the strophic poetry of Arabic or the Hebrew muwashshahs? After all, Hebrew was represented on the Iberian peninsula since Roman times, and Iberian literature, like the culture itself, was neither monolingual nor monocultural. Or should we start with the proto-Romance vernacular that was conflated with Latin – a ‘language’ that would ultimately turn into Castilian? This chapter ponders the first two generic ‘beginnings’: the subjectivity of lyric and the objectivity of epic.

  PublisherDOI

• In Memoriam: Alban K. Forcione (1938–2021)

  Cervantes Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Mathematics
  PublisherDOI

• In Memoriam: Alban K. Forcione (1938-2021)

  Cervantes Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Classics
  • Art history
  • Art

  In Memoriam:Alban K. Forcione (1938-2021) Marina S. Brownlee (bio) The worldwide expressions of admiration for the eminent Cervantes scholar, Alban K. Forcione, as well as the sadness registered by so many colleagues and students at his recent death, attest to his extraordinary impact on the field of 17th-century ("Golden Age") thought, literary theory and literature, especially on Cervantes studies. Born in Washington DC, Professor Forcione demonstrated his dedication to the cultural legacy of early modern Spain and its study even as an undergraduate, receiving his AB from Princeton in European Civilization in 1960. His senior thesis was entitled "Don Quixote: The Meaning of Madness," and it pointed the way to his life-long fascination with the works of Cervantes and their cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts. After completing an MA in Comparative Literature at Harvard in 1961, he became a Fulbright scholar in Madrid and Göttingen, thereafter returning to Princeton to write his PhD dissertation, entitled Cervantes, Aristotle, and the Persiles, published in 1970 by Princeton University Press. With this landmark study he began the modern rethinking of Persiles criticism, and two years later he published Cervantes' Christian Romance: A Study of Persiles Y Sigismunda, also with the Princeton UP. His brilliance was recognized early on, as demonstrated by the fact that in 1968, while finishing his dissertation, Alban Forcione was hired as an Assistant Professor at Princeton, where he was first named the Emery L. Ford Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature in 1980 and, after two years at Stanford between 1983-85, he returned to [End Page 11] Princeton as the William S. Carpenter Jr. Professor, a position he held until 2001. In the years between 2001 and 2005 he was a professor at Columbia, transferring to emeritus status in 2006. During his long and distinguished career, he also held Visiting Distinguished Professorships at Stanford, Dartmouth, UC Santa Barbara, Penn, Columbia, and Harvard, while in addition receiving the prestigious ACLS, NEH, and Guggenheim fellowships. Princeton University Press was eager to publish two more of his original works, this time Cervantes and the Humanist Vision: A Study of Four Exemplary Novels in 1982 and Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessless in 1984. His fifth book, published by Yale University Press, Majesty and Humanity: Kings and Their Doubles in the Political Drama of the Spanish Golden Age, appeared in 2009. This work has enriched the fields both of theater studies and representations of kingship. Beyond these foundational book-length texts, he has contributed seminal articles on a wealth of challenging topics such as Modernity and the Baroque, as well as a number of important essays on Gracián. Unlike many eminent scholars, Alban Forcione was not a conference groupie. In fact, he almost never spoke at academic meetings. Yet this clearly made no difference to his stellar career and his legacy of extraordinarily influential publications. Also unlike most academics, he preferred to teach on Friday afternoons—a time that often leads to small class attendance. The opposite was true of his seminars, however, which were always packed with students eager to learn from his innovative mind. A lasting testimony to Alban's legacy beyond his justly valued publications, is that during his long and inspirational years of teaching he attracted many graduate students to Princeton, a number of whom have gone on to achieve distinguished careers in their own right. Addressing the pedagogical power that Alban projected, Ted Bergman writes, "my own teaching owes so much to him. Many times each semester, especially when I'm teaching Don Quixote, I refer back to 'my professor in graduate school, Alban Forcione' during lectures. It's much more than an impromptu footnote or quick acknowledgement; it's steady recognition of how Alban's teaching lives on with my [End Page 12] own." He also justly praises Alban's perennially impressive "pinpointaccurate observations and surprising connections." Referring to his open-minded approach to scholarship and to graduate students and his regard for their particular interests, Rachel Schmidt expresses her "gratitude to Alban for accepting me into the PhD program as I already had a thesis project underway that he didn't always feel...

  PublisherDOI

• Cervantine Curiosity and the English Stage

  UNP - Nebraska eBooks · 2020-06-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2019-09-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Cervantes' Persiles and the Travails of Romance

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2019-09-13 · 3 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This collection of original essays presents new ways of looking at Cervantes’ final novel. Persiles, a work that engages with geopolitical models of race, ethnicity, nation, and religion, takes its inspiration from the highly influential Ethiopian Story (the Aithiopika) of Heliodorus. With particular relevance to the period, Persiles questions the issue of cultural pluralism in the Spanish empire and emphasizes the need to rethink the radically altered category of lo bárbaro/the barbarian (which included not only the Jew, the Muslim, and the Gypsy, but also the criollo, the mestizo, and the indiano), a new multiracial and multiethnic reality that posed a profound challenge to early modern Spain. The contributors offer a range of perspectives in spatial theory, psychology and subjectivity, visual culture, and literary theory

  PublisherDOI

• Interruption and the Fragment: Heliodorus and Persiles

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2019-09-17 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

  11 shared

• Kevin Brownlee

  10 shared

• Jacqueline Cerquiglini‐Toulet

  8 shared

• Sarah Kay

  New York University

  7 shared

• Daniel Boyarín

  6 shared

• David K. Wallace

  University of Toronto

  6 shared

• Jeffrey T. Schnapp

  6 shared

• Rachel Jacoff

  6 shared