Research
My research looks at sixteenth and seventeenth century literature in Spanish, working across Europe and the Americas and with a particular interest in establishing a dialogue between the narrative poetry of the period, sacred history and intellectual history. My first book was concerned with the ways in which epic poetry in the Viceroyalty of Peru was used to explore the ethical dilemmas of conflict and emerging notions of political community. In 2023-24 I am based in Madrid as a Leverhulme International Fellow and visiting professor at Universidad Eclesiástica San Dámaso and Universidad Complutense with the project 'Sacred epic and diasporic communities in the early modern Hispanic world’
Teaching
All areas of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spanish literature (papers VII, X, XII, XIV), as well as translation and the Prelims (first-year) course.
Graduate Teaching
I welcome applications from MSt and DPhil students working on early modern Hispanic literature and culture, especially those with an interest in poetry, religion, points of contact between literature and intellectual history, and/or colonial Latin America.
Selected Publications
Books
The Epic Mirror: Poetry, Conflict Ethics and Political Community in Colonial Peru (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2022)
Rodrigo Cacho and Imogen Choi, eds, The Rise of Spanish American Poetry, 1500-1700: Literary and Cultural Transmission in the New World (Cambridge: Legenda, 2019)
Articles and chapters
'Un no imitado artificio: la pareja palimpséstica de Fresia y Caupolicán en Arauco domado de Pedro de Oña', Etiópicas: Revista de Letras Renacentistas, 19 (2023), 139-159
Imogen Choi and Felipe Valencia, 'The Tragedy of Women in Power: La Araucana and Sixteenth-Century Neo-Senecan Theatre', Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 45.1 (2020), 63-92
‘La presencia oculta de Torquato Tasso en la Tercera parte de La Araucana de Alonso de Ercilla (1589-90)’, Bulletin Hispanique 121. 1 (2019), 73-101
‘Os lusíadas and Armas antárticas: Eros, Eris and the Art of Imitation in Colonial Epic’, in Rodrigo Cacho and Imogen Choi, eds, The Rise of Spanish American Poetry, 1500-1700: Literary and Cultural Transmission in the New World, pp. 222-238
'Épopée, guerre coloniale et communauté politique dans le vice-royaume du Pérou, 1560-1610’, trans. Aude Plagnard, Receuil Ouvert (2018)
‘The Spectacle of Conquest: Epic Conflicts on the Seventeenth-Century Spanish Stage’, in Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, Stephen Harrison, and Claire Kenward, eds, Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 336-350
‘¿"Adonde falta el rey, sobran agravios" (IV.5)? The Siege of Saint-Quentin and Two Worlds of War in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana’, in Stephen Boyd and Terence O’Reilly (eds) Artifice and Invention in the Spanish Golden Age (Cambridge: Legenda, 2014), pp. 173-84
‘"De gente que a ningún rey obedecen": Republicanism and Empire in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana’, BHS 91.4 (2014), 417-35