Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Although my graduate degree was in Romance Philology and in my teaching career I offered courses on historical Spanish and Romance Linguistics, my research interests centered on issues of Hispano-Arabic language, particularly the phenomenon of Aljamiado (Spanish written in the Arabic alphabet from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries). Eventually, a more narrowly linguistic focus (on language contact, borrowing and loan translation, dialectology, etc.) evolved into broader studies of a particular kind of text: the Arabic Qur’ān translated into Spanish, first by the Mudejars and eventually by the Moriscos, in both Latin-letter Spanish and Aljamiado. My three books on these topics are The Qur’ān in Sixteenth-Century Spain: Six Morisco Versions of Sūra 79 (London: Tamesis Books Ltd., 1982); Textos aljamiados sobre la vida de Mahoma: El Profeta de los moriscos. Fuentes Arábico-Hispanas, 16 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas - Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional, 1994); and El Corán de Toledo. Edición y estudio del manuscrito T 235 de la Biblioteca de Castilla-La Mancha, Bibliotheca Arabo-Romanica et Islamica, 5 (Gijón: Ediciones Trea, 2011). My research was supported at various times by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Foundation, and Spain’s Ministry of Education and Culture.

In retirement I have turned to academic translation from Spanish to English, often of books connected to my longtime research and areas of expertise. These include Ana Echevarría, The City of the Three Mosques: Ávila and its Muslims in the Middle Ages (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2011); Mercedes García-Arenal and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, The Spanish Orient: Converted Muslims, the Forged Gospels of Granada, and the Rise of Orientalism (Leiden: Brill, 2013); and José Miguel Puerta Vílchez, Aesthetics in Arabic thought: from pre-Islamic Arabia through Al-Andalus (Leiden: Brill, 2017). Four more titles are currently in press or under contract.