Professor Luis M. Girón Negrón
William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Comparative Literature and of Romance Languages and Literatures

About the Writer:Professor Girón-Negrón was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico and has been teaching at Harvard since he obtained his doctoral degree in 1997. He holds the William R. Kenan Jr. Chair of Comparative Literature and of Romance Languages and Literatures at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and serves as well as a Faculty Affiliate of the Harvard Divinity School. His scholarship centers on the religious and cultural history of the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages and through the early modern period: its Muslims, Christians and Jews, and how their exchanges shaped the literary history of Arabic, Hebrew, and the Ibero-Romance vernaculars (Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese). The bulk of his efforts have been devoted in particular to Hispanic literary works from the Middle Ages through the 17th century. Within medieval and early modern studies, his broader interests include mysticism and literature, approaches to lyric poetry, Romance and Semitic historical linguistics, theory and practice of translation in the Middle Ages, medieval and Renaissance literary theory, comparative philology, religion and literature, oral poetics, medieval and Sephardic Judeo-Spanish literature, and multilingual aesthetics. He is the author of Visión Deleytable: Philosophical Rationalism and the Religious Imagination in 15th Century Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2001), Las Coplas de Yosef: Entre la Biblia y el Midrash en la poesía judeoespañola (Madrid: Gredos, 2006-with Laura Minervini) and about four dozen scholarly articles. The first three volumes of an annotated edition and study of the Arragel Bible—an Old Spanish translation and commentary of the Hebrew Bible—developed with the generous support of an ACLS Fellowship, and in collaboration with Andrés Enrique Arias, Javier Pueyo Mena, and the late Ángel Sáenz Badillos, are forthcoming in 2024 in the Heterodoxia Iberica series for Brill (The Old Spanish Bible of Moshe Arragel: Volumes I [Introductory Studies and General Prologue], II [Genesis: Translation] and III [Genesis: Commentary]). His current projects include a bilingual edition of two Hispano-Jewish poets for the new subseries on medieval Iberia at the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (The Poems of Antonio de Montoro and Rodrigo Cota), and a forthcoming book on mysticism and literature in early modern Iberia entitled El envés de lo inefable: cuatro estudios de mística y literatura (Madrid: Vervuert-Iberoamericana). Prof. Girón-Negrón is also a Faculty Member in the Committee on the Study of Religion, the Committee on Medieval Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Center for Jewish Studies. A member of the Secular Franciscan Order engaged with interfaith initiatives; Luis served for many years as a Faculty Advisor to the Catholic Student Center. He is Harvard’s representative for the Humanities at the Academic Council of the Real Colegio Complutense in Madrid, spain.

Photo credits: