Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature

Isabel Jaén is Associate Professor of Spanish at Portland State University. She is co-founder and co-coordinator of the Literary Theory, Cognition, and the Brain working group at the Whitney Humanities Center in Yale University and former executive member of the Cognitive Approaches to Literature Division of the MLA (chair in 2011). She is co-editor of Cognitive Literary Studies and has recently published on Cervantes and human development, cognitive approaches to teaching Don Quixote, and empathy and gender activism in Zayas' Amorous and Exemplary Novels, among other topics.

Julien J. Simon is Associate Professor of Spanish and French at Indiana University East. He is co-founder of the Literary Theory, Cognition, and the Brain working group at the Whitney Humanities Center in Yale University (2005), former member of the executive committee for the MLA Division on Cognitive Approaches to Literature (chair in 2013), and former steering committee member of the Center for Cognitive Literary Studies at Purdue University. He has recently co-edited Cognitive Literary Studies and the special cluster Cognitive Cervantes of the Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America.

Bruce R. Burningham is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Theatre at Illinois State University, where he is also Chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. He is the author of Tilting Cervantes: Baroque Reflections on Postmodern Culture and Radical Theatricality: Jongleuresque Performance on the Early Spanish Stage. Currently, he is Editor of Cervantes, the journal of the Cervantes Society of America. He is also a recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities grant.

Judith G. Caballero Navarro is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. Her research focuses on cognitive literary studies, sartorial relevance, and marginalized voices. She is currently working on an anthology of comedias with a focus on the figure of the mother. She recently contributed to Gladys Robalino's project Female Amerindians in Early Modern Spanish Theater with
Catherine Connor (-Swietlicki) is Professor of Spanish at the University of Vermont. Author of Spanish Christian Cabala and numerous essays on early modern Spanish literature, theater and culture, she has published in Cervantes, Bulletin of the Comediantes, and other major journals and books. Since 2001, she has explored the bio-cultural and neuro-scientific processes that make possible our complex personal and social creativity in life and art. Her recent essays investigate how individual embodied minds engage Don Quixote and performance arts.

Elizabeth Cruz Petersen holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Studies with a dual concentration in seventeenth-century Spanish Peninsular Literature, and Performance Studies. Her publications include articles and theater reviews on early modern Spanish theater and translation. Cruz Petersen's recently submitted manuscript, Women's Somatic Training in Early Modern Spanish Theater, shows how the early modern Spanish woman actor subscribed to various somatic practices in an effort to prepare for a role on stage.

Julia Domínguez is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Iowa State University. She has published on Cervantes, the picaresque, and film in the Bulletin of Comediantes, Hispania, Cervantes and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, among others. She is the editor of Cervantes in Perspective and the co-editor of Hispanic Studies in Honor of Robert L. Fiore. Her present research centers on human cognition as understood during Cervantes's time. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Cervantes and Memory.

Isabel Jaén is Associate Professor of Spanish at Portland State University. She is co-founder and co-coordinator of the Literary Theory, Cognition, and the Brain working group at the Whitney Humanities Center in Yale University and former executive member of the Cognitive Approaches to Literature Division of the MLA (chair in 2011). She is co-editor of Cognitive Literary Studies and has recently published on Cervantes and human development, cognitive approaches to teaching Don Quixote, and empathy and gender activism in Zayas' Amorous and Exemplary Novels, among other topics.

Howard Mancing is Professor of Spanish at Purdue University. He is the author of The Chivalric World of Don Quijote, The Cervantes Encyclopedia, and Miguel de Cervantes' . He has co-edited two other books: Text, Theory, and Performance: Golden Age Comedia Studies and Theory of Mind and Literature. He is the author of some 75 articles and essays on Cervantes, the picaresque novel, narrative theory, the teaching of literature, cognitive approaches to the study of literature, and other subjects.

Cory A. Reed is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on early modern performance, the representation of identity in early modern literature, literary responses to the emergence of scientific discourse, and cognitive cultural studies. He has published on Cervantes's drama, the Novelas ejemplares, Don Quixote, the drama of Calderón, and opera as a literary/dramatic form.
Currently he is completing a book on technological imagery, agency, and aesthetics of instrumentality in Don Quixote.

Domingo Ródenas de Moya is Associate Professor of Spanish Literature at Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona). He is author of Los espejos del novelista, Prosa del 27, Travesías vanguardistas, and co-author with Jordi Gracia of Ensayo español. Siglo XX, and Historia de la literatura española, 7: Derrota y restitución de la modernidad, 1939-2010. His recent publications include Guillermo de Torre: De la aventura al orden and a study on Don Quixote's narrators (Don Quijote, Real Academia Española, 2015).

Ryan Schmitz holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently Associate Professor of Spanish at Texas Christian University. He is the author of numerous articles on selfhood, the body, and courtly conduct in Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares and the Quixote, as well as early modern transoceanic utopias, which have appeared in Modern Language Notes, Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, and eHumanista.

Barbara Simerka is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Queens College/CUNY. She is author of Knowing Subjects: Cognitive Cultural Studies and Early Modern Spanish Literature and Discourses of Empire. She co-edited Cognitive Cervantes, a special cluster of essays in Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America (Spring 2012). She has published essays on empathy and literature of marginalized groups; prototype theory and literary genres; theory of mind in privanza literature; cognitive theory and science fiction.

Julien J. Simon is Associate Professor of Spanish and French at Indiana University East. He is co-founder of the Literary Theory, Cognition, and the Brain working group at the Whitney Humanities Center in Yale University (2005), former member of the executive committee for the MLA Division on Cognitive Approaches to Literature (chair in 2013), and former steering committee member of the Center for Cognitive Literary Studies at Purdue University. He has recently co-edited Cognitive Literary Studies and the special cluster Cognitive Cervantes of the Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America.

Jose Valenzuela is a Doctoral Candidate and Researcher at the Facultat d'Humanitats [Faculty of Humanities] of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, where he studies the cognitive mechanisms that prompt an emotional response in readers during their transportation to fictional worlds and teaches a course in literature and the cognitive sciences. He is also an electronic engineer, automatics engineer, and holds an MA in biomedical engineering and in creative writing. His work experience ranges from nanomaterials physics laboratories to cognitive neuroscience and virtual reality research groups.