About

William Viestenz is associated with the Iberian Studies Initiative at the University of Minnesota, which is an interdisciplinary research collaborative that brings together scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds. The initiative focuses on exploring Iberia as a subject of inquiry across different periods, languages, and identities, emphasizing the importance of transnational and global perspectives. The work aims to rethink narratives of past national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious identities by considering Iberia as a space that encompasses the realities of African, Asian, and Latin American immigration based on colonial patterns and new economic and social realities. The initiative seeks to develop collaborative projects, curriculum, organize events, and foster scholarly collaboration both locally and internationally, complementing other scholarly initiatives such as Mediterranean and Transoceanic Studies, the Global South, Translation, and Global Studies.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Political Science
• Epistemology
• Sociology
• Psychoanalysis
• Law
• Anthropology
• Aesthetics
• Art
• Literature

Selected publications

• OLGA SENDRA FERRER. Barcelona: City of Margins. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2022. xii + 272 pp.

  Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos · 2025-05-29

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Reseña de Barcelona: City of Margins de Olga Sendra Ferrer.

  PublisherDOI

• 11 Ready-to-Hand: The Withdrawal of Animal Life in Francoist Cultural Production

  Boydell and Brewer eBooks · 2023-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter Eight. Jesús Carrasco’s Intemperie: The Literature of Post-Immunological Modernity

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Epistemology
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• Ready-to-Hand: The Withdrawal of Animal Life in Francoist Cultural Production

  2023-01-17

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• FUTURES PAST: HORIZONS OF EXPECTATION FOR NORTH AMERICAN CATALAN STUDIES

  Catalan Review · 2023-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Skin to Skin

  Romanic Review · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract This article analyzes two Catalan novels, Albert Sánchez Piñol’s Victus: Barcelona 1714 (2012) and Martí Domínguez’s L’esperit del temps (2019), in light of the concept of immunity developed by the Italian theorist Roberto Esposito. It is argued that the two works share an affinity by demonstrating the material relevance of Esposito’s concepts, especially with reference to the skin as the basis for biopolitics. Victus links the rending of skin to textuality but simultaneously uses the breaking open of the body to highlight community as an assemblage of diverse material actors and agents. L’esperit del temps situates Nazi thanatopolitics at the intersection of biology and law, emphasizing how a politics of death relies on what kinds of matter, such as the phenotype of skin, are fetishized, pathologized, and subjected to human-centered techniques of power. Domínguez returns to the Second World War to comment on more contemporary concerns regarding bioethics and the increasingly mainstream presence of extremist politics in Europe. Opening the discussion with the reflections on skin of Donna Haraway and Jean-Luc Nancy, the article closes by engaging with Haraway’s work on companionship and the “illicit fusion” of beings, particularly in the historical period referred to as the “Chthulucene,” in which kinship and multispecies assemblages are viewed as tools for survival.

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• Ready-to-Hand:

  2022-11-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Paradoxes of stasis: literature, politics, and thought in Francoist Spain

  Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies · 2021-10-02

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• A Stone That Makes Them Stumble:

  Vanderbilt University Press eBooks · 2021-09-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Subject, Structure, and Imagination in the Spanish Discourse on Modernity by Christopher Soufas Jr

  Revista de estudios hispánicos · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Subject, Structure, and Imagination in the Spanish Discourse on Modernity by Christopher Soufas Jr William Viestenz Soufas, Christopher, Jr. Subject, Structure, and Imagination in the Spanish Discourse on Modernity. Palgrave, 2015. 192 pp. The Spanish resistance to the Enlightenment modality of a self-determinant, autonomous subject in Golden Age and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature is the focus of Christopher Soufas Jr.'s welcome study, Subject, Structure and Imagination in the Spanish Discourse on Modernity. Soufas frames Spain's primary contributions to the unfolding of modernity as a dialectical engagement with the primacy of the subjective capacity for reason, and an objection to the repurposing of the imagination from serving as a conduit for a dialogic relation with the world, to becoming a rival of the intellect in the act of consciousness and elaboration of reasoning practices. Through a wide-ranging and convincing exegesis of canonical texts from Spain's Golden Age and fin de siècle periods, Soufas demonstrates that Spanish attitudes towards subjectivity and imagination remained predicated, to varying degrees, on an early-modern epistemology "which assigns greater value to the concrete physical world (the 'body' of nature as opposed to the 'mind' of a subject) and which continues to depend upon a structural model that resists subject-centered discourse" (7). In lieu of proposing that Spanish authors advocate for one model of the imagination over another, Soufas's tenet is that the discourse on modernity in Spain has roots that precede the epistemological and aesthetic notions of Descartes, Burke, and Kant, to name a few frequently cited names in the text. In his elaboration of the emergence of modernity in Spain as a phenomenon to be understood in both historical and philosophical terms, Soufas's study serves, for Hispanists, as a useful companion to Anthony Cascardi's major study, The Subject of Modernity. Cascardi challenges Jürgen Habermas's contention that the specificity of the modern subject can be understood as a function of philosophy and advocates for studying an intersectionality of discourses, some contrasting with, and others extrapolating upon what came before in the Ancient and Medieval periods. Cascardi's approach, though committing considerable space to Cervantes, is amply theoretical, whereas Soufas's work offers an expanded meditation focused on two important historical periods in Spain, and a series of close readings of essential literary texts, which helps scholars distil a more concentrated understanding of how the tensions and contradictions of the discourse of modernity developed on the Iberian Peninsula. Soufas notes that the majority of writers, including Fredric Jameson with his influential work on the intellectual signposts of modernity's emergence, locate the articulation of the Cartesian cogito as one of the primary fault lines in the transition from a subjectivity intimately associated with the physical and sensorial world, to an autonomous, self-reflexive subject. In the first chapter of the book, [End Page 318] Soufas proposes from this approach that Lazarillo de Tormes constitutes not only an exercise in the picaresque genre, but also an interrogation of the negative fallout from the emergence of an autonomous thinking subject, in contrast to a mode of being attuned to pre-modern and early-modern value systems. This chapter, taken together with contributions focused on Don Quijote, La vida es sueño, El burlador de Sevilla, and Velázquez's "Las meninas," comprises the first section of the text, and demonstrates how the pre- and early-modern Spanish authors exhibited an allegiance to superseded value systems in the face of Europe's transition to modernity. The second chapter dedicated to Cervantes's magnum opus asserts the provocative claim that Quijote's madness was a consequence of modernity's emergence and the demand to exert reasoning practices upon the world in lieu of dialoging with external reality via the senses. Madness, then, becomes less a longing for a past, as documented in the books of chivalry, to which the protagonist is famously attached, and more the end result of an imagination that can no longer direct reason, in a predictable fashion, to "physical and moral circumstance" (44). In the following chapter, Soufas interprets the concluding act of La vida es sueño as a disavowal of...

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Frequent coauthors

• Katarzyna Olga Beilin

  4 shared

• Joan Ramón Resina

  1 shared

• Daniel Ares López

  San Diego State University

  1 shared

• John Beusterien

  1 shared

• Elena Lahr Vivaz

  1 shared

• Sainath Suryanarayanan

  1 shared

• Luis I. Prádanos

  Miami University

  1 shared

• Joyce Tolliver

  1 shared