Spotlight on Professor Caroline Egan

SPOTLIGHT ON PROFESSOR CAROLINE EGAN

Ijoined the Spanish and Portuguese Department in 2020. My first year was entirely virtual, and it has been a pleasure to return to in-person teaching and activities. I am originally from Pennsylvania, where I completed my B.A. and M.A. in Comparative Literature at Penn State. I then completed my doctorate at Stanford and subsequently lectured at Cambridge University before joining Northwestern. My research and writing currently revolve around early modern theorizations of language and corporeality and their impact on processes of translation, grammaticalization, and conversion in a transatlantic context, with a comparative emphasis on Brazil, Mexico, and Peru. I am especially interested in studying grammars, dictionaries, doctrines, devotional poetry, and similar works written in and about Indigenous languages in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. More broadly, I am interested in opportunities to bring colonial Latin American studies into conversation with related fields, like contemporary film and early modern Spanish studies. In this vein, I recently completed co-editing the Routledge Companion to Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture (2022). Here in the Spanish and Portuguese Department, I have taught courses on topics like colonial Latin American literature, Don Quixote, and the early modern Transatlantic. In my classes, I emphasize close reading, material culture, and creative and collaborative work. In my class on Latin American Literature before 1888, for instance, I invite students to recreate and adapt colonial-era works and then write critically on the significance of their recreations. This has led to final projects including self-portraits, screenplays, and interpretive dance. During the Spring 2022 quarter, I organized a joint graduate seminar with a colleague at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Dr. Sarissa Carneiro. Through an International Relations/Buffett Institute International Classroom Partnering Grant, we designed a four-week program on the topic of “Corporalidades y poéticas coloniales,” featuring invited speakers from Mexico, Peru, Spain, and the US.

Summer 2022, I conducted archival research in Lima, Arequipa, and Cusco. I am delighted to be a part of the Spanish and Portuguese Department and the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research here at Northwestern. Please feel free to send me an email (caroline. egan@northwestern.edu) or stop by my office (3121)—it has been lovely getting to know everyone in the department.