University of Virginia Spanish, Italian & Portuguese

Professor of Spanish

Research: Heresy, mysticism, religion and society, Cervantes, and Spanish Golden age literature.

Responsibilities: Spanish Undergraduate Curriculum Committee; University Committee on Educational Planning and Curriculum; President, Virginia Society of Fellows; Vice-president of Phi Beta Kappa, Beta Chapter

ALISON WEBER, Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia, was educated at the University of California, Berkeley (B.A. and M.A in Spanish) and the University of Illinois (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature). She is the author of Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton University Press, 1990), Feminist Topics in Spanish Golden Age Literature (special edition of the Journal of Hispanic Philology, 1989), and prepared the introduction and notes for the edition of For the Hour of Recreation by María de San José Salazar (University of Chicago Press, 2002). She has also published articles on heresy and the Spanish Inquisition, female monasticism, and Spanish Golden Age literature. She joined the faculty of the University of Virginia in 1985 and served as Chair of the department from 1995-1998. From 1998-99 she was a Research Associate in Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. She has been an invited speaker at Yale University, Harvard Divinity School, the University of Barcelona, Akademie der Diozese Rottenburg-Stuttgart in Weingarten, Germany, the Washington Theological Union, the King Juan Carlos Center at NYU and other U.S. colleges and universities. She is the President of the Virginia Society of Fellows. Her current research projects include a study of attitudes toward religious ecstasy in early modern Spain, the religious conversion of Lope de Vega, and a collection of essays on the Spanish mystics for the Modern Language Association “Approaches to Teaching” series.

Selected Publications:

Teresa de Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. Italian translation, 1993. Paperback edition, 1996.

Feminist Topics. Ed. with an Introduction by Alison Weber. Special Issue of Journal of Hispanic Philology. Volume 13, Number 3 (1989).

“Saint Teresa, Demonologist.” In Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain. Ed. Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry. University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1992. 171-95.

“Between Ecstasy and Exorcism: Religious Negotiation in Sixteenth-Century Spain.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1993): 221-34.

“Pentimento: The Parodic Text of La gitanilla.” Hispanic Review 62 (1994): 59-75.

“On the Margins of Ecstasy: María de San José as (Auto)biographer.” Journal of the Institute of Romances Studies 4 (1996): 251-68.

“Celestina and the Discourses of Servitude.” Negotiating Past and Present: Studies in Spanish Literature for Javier Herrero. Ed. David T. Gies. Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood Press, 1997. 127-44.

“The Ideologies of Cervantine Irony: Liberalism, Postmodernism, and Beyond.” In Cervantes and his Postmodern Constituencies. Ed. Anne J. Cruz and Carroll B. Johnson. New York: Garland P, 1999. 218-34

“St. Teresa’s Problematic Patrons.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29.2 (1999): 357-79.

“Recent Research on Women and Religion in Spanish.” Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 197-206.

“The Fortunes of Ecstasy: Teresa of Avila and the Carmelite Reform.” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 28.4 (1999): 127-150.

“Spiritual Administration: Gender and Discernment in the Carmelite Reform.” Sixteenth-Century Journal. 31.1 (2000): 127-50.

“Demonizing Ecstasy: Alonso de la Fuente and the alumbrados of Extremadura.” In The Mystical Gesture: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Spiritual Culture in Honor of Mary E. Giles. Ed. Robert Boenig. Ashgate Press, 2000. 147-65.

“The Partial Feminism of Ana de San Bartolomé.” In Recovering Spain’s Feminist Tradition. Ed. Lisa Vollendorf. New York: Publications of the Modern Language Association, 2001. 69-87.

“The Three Lives of the Vida: The Uses of Convent Autobiography.” In Women and Texts and Authority in Early Modern Spain. Ed. Marta Vicente and Luis Corteguera. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2003. 107-25

“Lope de Vega’s rimas sacras: Conversion, Clientage, and the Performance of Masculinity.” PMLA 120 (2005): 404-21.