Assistant Professor (2008)

Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean; Saints and Sanctity

Office Hours: Wed. 9-12

Office: Levering 211

Phone: (434) 924-7687

Email: erowevirginia.edu

BA Washington College (1996)

PhD The Johns Hopkins University (2005)

“St. Teresa and Olivares: Patron Sainthood, Royal Favorites, and the Politics of Plurality in Seventeenth-Century Spain,” Sixteenth Century Journal 37, no. 3 (2006), 721-737.

“The Spanish Minerva: Imagining Teresa of Avila as Patron Saint in Seventeenth-Century Spain,” The Catholic Historical Review, vol. XCVII, no. 3 (October, 2006), 416-438.

Review of Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor: The Achievement of Friar Bartolomé Carranza, edited by John Edwards and Ronald Truman in Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies Bulletin, Vol. XXXII, nos. 1 and 2 (2007), 51-52.

Review of Saints and Their Cults in the Atlantic World, edited Margaret Cormack in Sixteenth Century Journal 39, no. 3 (2008).

Work in Progress
Under Contract, Saint and Nation: Teresa of Avila, Santiago, and Plural Identities in Early Modern Spain. (Penn State University Press.)

 University of Virginia Summer Research Grant 2009

NEH Summer Institute (Berber North Africa)    2007
Franklin Research Grant, American Philosophical Society    2006
American Academy in Rome Visiting Scholar    2006
(a non-stipendiary residential program)
Junior Professor Development Fund, University of Oregon    2006
New Faculty Award, University of Oregon    2006
Spencer Brush Fellowship, University of Oregon    2005 - 2007
The Johns Hopkins University Dean’s Teaching Fellowship    2005
William J. Fulbright Fellowship    2002 - 2003
Program for Cultural Cooperation, Spanish Ministry
of Culture and US Universities Research Grant    2002
JHU, Department of History, Propaedeutic Fellowship    1998 - 1999

I am currently working on my book manuscript, Saint and Nation, which examines the role that patron sainthood played in the development of emergent national consciousness in Europe.  The book centers on a fierce polemic that erupted in early seventeenth-century Spain when the Castilian parliament voted in favor of elevating Teresa of Avila (d. 1582) to co-patron saint of Spain alongside its traditional patron, Santiago.  I investigate the complex meaning of national patron sainthood in the context of emerging early modern national identities.  I am also working on an article-length project, entitled “Sixteenth-century Historiography, Santiago, and the Invention of Spain”, which examines the ways in which sixteenth-century historians constructed the story of Spain’s past, with particular emphasis on Santiago’s evangelization and the story of the 711 conquest.  It considers how a nation or region created an imagined community through the invention of a communal past.

In addition, I am in the beginning stages of my next major project, provisionally entitled African Saints: Race, Gender, and Sanctity in the Early Modern Mediterranean, which will examine discourses of race and sanctity in both written and visual media (specifically, sermons and sacred art) throughout the Catholic Mediterranean, with particular emphasis on Spain, Italy, and Portugal.