Rate My Professor Elizabeth Wright

Elizabeth R. Wright serves as Distinguished Research Professor of Spanish Literature in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Georgia, where she also holds the position of Associate Academic Director at the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. She earned her Ph.D. in Spanish literature from Johns Hopkins University in 1998, a Master of Arts in English literature from Northwestern University in 1992, and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Illinois in 1985. Wright has received numerous honors for her scholarly contributions, including the University of Georgia Distinguished Research Professor title in 2020, the Creative Research Medal, the Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award from the Office of Research, and the M. G. Michael Award from the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. The Bulletin of the Comediantes, the international journal devoted to early-modern Spanish theater which she edits, was awarded Best Journal Design by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2019.

A scholar of the literature and culture of Spanish early modernity, Wright examines diverse writing practices through which individuals and communities grappled with expanded geographic and cultural horizons spurred by transatlantic navigation and empire building. Her current book project, Iberia's Atlantic Households: Slavery and Diaspora in the Age of Empire (1444-1640), investigates the Portuguese-Spanish cultural nexus and the integration of new slave trafficking modes into economic life, language, and humor. Key publications include The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2016); The Battle of Lepanto, co-edited with Sarah Spence and Andrew Lemons (Harvard University Press, 2014); Los ramilletes de Madrid by Lope de Vega, critical edition (Gredos, 2012); Spanish Golden-Age Drama in Mexican Translation, co-edited with Louise M. Burkhart and Barry D. Sell (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008); and Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 1598-1621 (Bucknell University Press, 2001). She has secured prestigious funding such as the National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant (co-principal investigator with Nicholas Jones, $96,000, 2021), Mellon Foundation Global Georgia Program research grant (co-principal investigator, $18,000, 2019–2021), NEH Summer Stipend (2018), Fulbright Honorary Senior Scholar Research Award (2008), Gilder Lehrman Center Fellowship (2015), and Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency (2011). Wright's internationally recognized work advances studies in Latin American, Iberian and Latinx Studies, transatlantic and diaspora studies, literary aesthetics and poetics, and media, visual culture, and performance studies.