Dana Bultman

Blurred image of the arch used as background for stylistic purposes.

Professor of Spanish

Department Head

I am a scholar of early modern Spanish literature who studies how cultural forms shape perception and social life.

My research focuses on how poetry, narrative, and theological writing mediate relationships between emotion, cognition, and the material world. My work brings together literary analysis, intellectual history, and critical theory to understand how cultural forms produce meaning and organize social relations. I am particularly interested in how creative practices contribute to forms of cultural and social repair.

My most recent essays analyze how aesthetic mediation can both reinforce systems of power and enable forms of critical reflection and social transformation. Early modern writers of the Spanish Empire, in this context, developed alternative models of subjectivity and embodiment that challenge dominant narratives of European modernity.

I also co-direct a vertically integrated research project, in which undergraduate and graduate students collaborate on public humanities and rural engagement: Humanities in Public Life: A Multilingual Inquiry (VIPR). This work explores how storytelling, performance, and archival practices function as forms of aesthetic mediation that foster shared understanding and address contemporary social challenges.

Graduate students please read my guidelines for working together.

Research

Research Areas:

Latin American, Iberian & Latinx Studies

Literary Aesthetics & Poetics

Research Interests:

16th and 17th century Spain, treatises, conduct books, lyric poetry, Franciscan studies, women writers, Baroque aesthetics.

Frequently Taught Courses

Courses Regularly Taught:

Selected Publications

Selected Publications:

BOOKS

Francisco de Osuna’s Norte de los estados in Modernized Spanish: A Practical Guide to Conjugal Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Leeds, UK: ARC Humanities Press, 2019. 360 pp.
Heretical Mixtures: Feminine and Poetic Opposition to Matter-Spirit Dualism in Spain, 1531-1631. Valencia, Spain: Albatros-Hispanófila Siglo XXI, 2007. 229 pp. (on Luis de Góngora's poetics).

ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS

“Josefa Amar’s Enlightened Silences: Drawing Divisions with a Peculiar Catalogue of Early Modern Women,” in Journal of Gender and Sexuality Studies/ Revista de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades (2024) 50 (1-2): 41-61. https://doi.org/10.14321/jgendsexustud.50.1-2.0041
"Waste, Exclusion, and the Responsibility of the Rich: A Franciscan Critique of Early Capitalist Europe." Religions. 13.9 (2022): 18pp. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13090818
"Winds, Heart, and Heat in Premodern Franciscan and Nahua Concepts of 'Soul.'" Colonial Latin American Review. 27.3 (2018): 296-315. https://doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2018.1527525
“‘Your Clogs will be My Stairway to Heaven:’ A Wife’s Spiritual Goodness in Francisco de Osuna’s Reformist Dialogue on Marriage, Norte de los estados.” Paradigm Shifts during the Global Middle Ages and Renaissance. Ed. Albrecht Classen. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2019: 255-78.
“Social Class.” In Using Primary Sources: A Practical Guide for Students. Ed. Jonathan Hogg. Liverpool University Press and University of Liverpool Library in partnership with KISC, 2017. An Open Access e-textbook.
“Jealousy in María de Zayas’s Intercalated Poetry: Lyric Illness and Narrative Cure.” In Golden Age Poetry in Motion. Eds. Jean Andrews and Isabel Torres. Woodbridge, England: Tamesis, 2014: 145-163.
“Conceptualización de la naturaleza creativa: Góngora y Luis Martín de la Plaza en Flores de poetas ilustres (1605).” In Los géneros poéticos del Siglo de Oro: Centros y periferias. Eds. Rodrigo Cacho Casal y Anne Holloway. Woodbridge, England: Tamesis, 2013: 295-312.
“Humanist and Mystical Understanding in Luis de León’s ‘Noche serena’ and John of the Cross’s ‘La noche oscura.’” In Approaches to Teaching Teresa of Avila and the Spanish Mystics. Ed. Alison Weber. New York: Modern Language Association, 2009: 232-239.
“Fray Luis de León.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 318: Sixteenth-Century Spanish Writers. Ed. Gregory B. Kaplan. Columbia, SC: Bruccoli, Clarke & Layman, Inc., 2006: 138-146.
“Sixteenth-Century Spanish Humanism.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 318: Sixteenth-Century Spanish Writers. Ed. Gregory B. Kaplan. Columbia, SC: Bruccoli, Clarke & Layman, Inc., 2006: 296-304.
“The Early Modern Sonnet's Lessons of Petrarchism and Militarism.” Ed. Edward Friedman. Calíope 11.2 (2005): 33-43.
“Góngora’s Invocation of Prudente Cónsul: Censorship and Humanist Doubts about his Lyric Language.” Hispanófila 142 (2004): 1-19.
“Scripted Oralities circa 1607-1617: Language and Intention in Góngora’s Las firmezas de Isabela and Lope’s Lo fingido verdadero.” Bulletin of the Comediantes 55.1 (2003): 47-67.
“Shipwreck as Heresy: Placing Góngora’s Poetry in the Wake of Renaissance Epic, Fray Luis and the Christian Kabbala.” Hispanic Review 70.3 (2002): 413-432.

Articles Featuring Dana Bultman

Congratulations to Erin Bolívar!

Tuesday, March 7, 2023 - 9:20pm

Erin Bolívar was awarded a Spring 2023 Willson Center for Humanities and Arts Graduate Research Award for her dissertation research on the portrayal of the Virgin Mary in Spanish and Italian painting and poetry.

Felicitationes & Complimenti!