Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Giovanni received his B.A. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. At the same university he earned his M.A. in Sociology with the thesis, “Aromatización generalizada y efectos de trascendencia mediante objetos fragantes”. He currently is a Ph.D. candidate focused on Late Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Literature and holds a doctoral Minor in Renaissance Studies. His theoretical interests include approaches to new materialisms, gender studies, literary realisms, and the history of ideas. Giovanni explores the ways in which direct associations between femininity and material aspects of existence were established and constantly reworked across Western philosophy and literature to different ends, while creating, within diverse parameters, aesthetic iterations of a feminine and effeminizing materiality. Particularly, he investigates how the aforementioned tradition was experimented with in Late Medieval works like Libro de buen amor, Arcipreste de Talavera, and Visión Deleytable, “pre-Celestinesque” texts that foregrounded traits that later converged and were provocatively reworked in La Celestina. Finally, he also examines the different ways in which subsequent Celestinesque works in the 16th and early 17th centuries recast and confronted the Tragicomedia’s novel treatment of feminine materiality.