Nicolás Vivalda

Nicolás M. Vivalda is a Professor of Hispanic Studies at Vassar College, where he teaches Spanish and Latin American literature and culture. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on early modern Spanish and Latin American literature, with particular interests in epistemology, the representation of cognitive and mystical experience, political thought, and the history of medicine and scientific knowledge. His work explores the intersections of literature, philosophy, religion, and science, with special attention to the circulation of knowledge across the Spanish Atlantic world.

Mr. Vivalda is the author of Del atalaya a los límites de Faetón (Scripta Humanistica, 2013) and has published articles and book chapters on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, and seventeenth-century Spanish urban culture. His recent scholarship examines Baroque conceptions of knowledge and its limits, medical and nutritional discourses in early modern Madrid, and the rhetorical strategies through which religious experience was represented and negotiated in the seventeenth century. His long-standing research on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz explores the mythological and philosophical frameworks of Primero sueño and the poem’s broader epistemological concerns. His current research also examines Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda’s mystical experiences, bilocation narratives, and correspondence with Philip IV, with particular attention to the intersections of literary mediation, religious authority, and transatlantic culture.

Mr. Vivalda has also contributed to collaborative editorial and pedagogical projects. As Consulting Editor of the Oviedo Project at Vassar College, he has worked with Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Michael Aronna, and student translators on the first complete English translation of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s Historia general y natural de las Indias, a collaborative scholarly project culminating in a print edition. His scholarly work has appeared in journals including Calíope, Boletín de la Biblioteca Menéndez Pelayo, and Bulletin of the Comediantes, as well as in edited volumes published by academic presses.

His teaching spans Spanish and Latin American literature, film, and cultural history, including courses on Latin American horror, the picaresque novel, Cervantes, and magic, witchcraft, and sorcery in early modern Spain.