Simone Pinet

Simone Pinet studies medieval and early modern Spanish literatures and cultures, from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, especially in relation to spatiality, economics, poetics, translation, and most recently, sound, with an eye --especially in her teaching-- to the long-term connections between the medieval and the modern, both in contemporary Spain and Latin America. She received her PhD from Harvard University and her BA from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and came to Columbia from Cornell University, where she was a professor of Spanish and a faculty member of Medieval Studies and Religious Studies after teaching at Yale University. Related areas of interest include visual studies, cartography, political economy, and sound studies. Her book, Archipelagoes: Insularity and Fiction from Romance to the Novel (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) examines literature and cartography in Spain in the transition from the medieval to the early modern through the figure of the island, with a complementary focus on the isolario –a cartographic genre—and the first book of chivalry, Amadís de Gaula, which became a best-seller in early modern Europe with numerous printings, translations, sequels, and imitations. A second book, The Task of the Cleric (University of Toronto Press, 2016), takes the thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre, the first learned work in what we now call Spanish, as a focal point for the discussion of cartography, translation, and political economy in relation to different popular medieval tropes and rhetorical strategies across different archives and texts. She is currently at work on two book projects, a first on soundscapes of medieval Iberia (Voice to Noise: Literary Soundscapes of Medieval Iberia), and a second on economic metaphors and rhetorical strategies traced through canonical works of the Iberian Peninsula from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries (Economies of Medieval Iberian Fiction).