Contact Information: Office: Wilson 119 Phone: 4-7543 E-mail: padron@virginia.edu Mail: P.O. Box 400777 Responsibilities:

RICARDO PADRÓN is an Associate Professor of Spanish. He holds a BA in Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia, an MA in Divinity from the University of Chicago, and an MA and Ph.D. in Romance Languages from Harvard University. He is interested in the literature and culture of the early modern Hispanic world, particularly in the various expressions of the Hispanic imperial imagination. His first book, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature and Empire in Early Modern Spain, was published in 2004 by the University of Chicago Press. Inspired by the work of Henri Lefebvre, J. Brian Harley, Paul Carter and other contributors to contemporary critical geography, the book examines both maps and literary works from sixteenth-century Spain in the light of the changing conceptualizations of space and rationalizations of empire. Professor Padrón’s work on this book was supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and from the University of Virginia. His interests also include the formation of early modern masculinity, especially as it occurs in the poetry of Alonso de Ercilla and Garcilaso de la Vega. His most recent work, however, explores Spanish interest in the Pacific and Asia, as well as the poetry of Luis de Góngora.

Selected publications:

The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

"The Hero in Drag: Revisiting Garcilaso’s Second Eclogue." Forthcoming in Annals of Scholarship.

"The Stage of Idolatry: Calderón de la Barca’s La aurora en Copacabana." Forthcoming, in The Bulletin of Spanish Studies.

"Charting Empire, Charting Difference: Gómara's Historia general de las Indias and Spanish Maritime Cartography." Colonial Latin American Review. Forthcoming.

"Exiled Subjects, Paper Empires: Revisiting Love and Heroism in Herrera." Hispanic Review. Forthcoming.

"Mapping Plus Ultra: Cartography, Space, and Hispanic Modernity." Representations 79 (2002): 28-60.

"Charting Empire, Charting Difference: Gómara’s Historia general de las Indias and Spanish Maritime Cartography." Colonial Latin American Review 11. 1 (2002): 47-69.

"Exiled Subjects, Paper Empires: Revisiting Love and Heroism in Herrera." Hispanic Review 70/4 (2002): 497-520.

"Love American Style: The Virgin Land and the Sodomitic Body in Ercilla's Araucana." Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 34 (2000): 563-86.

"Cumandá and the Cartographers: Nationalism and Form in Juan Leon Mera." Annals of Scholarship 12/3&4 (1998): 217-34.

Complete C.V.