Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish
Esteban Crespo is a Transatlantic Literature and Cultures scholar, primarily focusing on gender and sexuality in the Early Modern Iberian worlds in relation to the history of the book, contemporary critical thought, and colonial studies. His research aims to strengthen the position of Iberian and Colonial Latin American Studies as fundamental interlocutors for Lesbian, Trans, Queer, and Gay Studies. His work has been supported by the Folger Library, Harvard’s Houghton Library, Yale’s Beinecke Library, the John Carter Brown Library, Yale’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Renaissance Society of America. Esteban’s most recent scholarly contributions have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica or in edited books such as Logomotives: Words that Change the Premodern World (Edinburgh University Press) and The Routledge Companion to Race in Early Modern Artistic, Material, and Visual Production. Esteban is also passionate about reaching audiences beyond academia through his writing and public speaking.
His first book project, ‘Queer Iberian Intimacies: Constructing Early Modern Dissident Sexual Cultures’, analyzes the presence of sexual and gender variance in the Iberian Peninsula and the viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This project argues, on the one hand, that early modern Iberian cultures incorporated dissident sexualities and gender variance in richer, more quotidian ways than only through policing systems, including mainstream culture. On the other, it demonstrates that such ways were ubiquitous on both sides of the Atlantic.