Susanna Allés Torrent
2023-2024
François Chevalier Fellow
University of Miami
Life Writings and Biographical Constructions in 15th Century Spain
Biography
Susanna Allés-Torrent is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami. She received her Ph.D. in Romance Philology from the Universitat de Barcelona and a Master’s degree in Digital Humanities from the École nationale des chartes (2012). She has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (2012-2014) and a reader at Columbia University (2014-2016), as well as a visiting researcher at different international centres such as the Center for Digital Scholarship (Brown University, 2013), Institut de Recherche et Histoire des Textes (Paris, 2014), or the École Française de Rome (2020).
Her research interests include the history of translation, with a special focus on the fifteenth century, the biographical genre as a literary form, textual criticism, philology and digital scholarly publishing. Her more than thirty publications include a monograph with a study and critical edition of the Lives of Hannibal and Scipio written by the Italian humanist Donato Acciuaiuoli and translated by Alfonso de Palencia in 1491. She has recently edited two special issues on the relationship between the digital humanities and Hispanic studies, one in the journal Hispania, and the other in the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative.
Research project
This project explores the writings and collections of biographies in the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century, and how these texts were received and circulated in their time. Throughan archive of primary sources, written in Spanish, Catalan, and Latin, it analyses the development and forms of biographical narratives, conventions of reading and writing, and constructions of models for public action and social projection. The central works for the study are three collections written in Spanish and one in Latin.
Between 1450 and 1455, Fernán Pérez de Guzmán composed the Generaciones y semblanzas, a collection of thirty-four biographies of relevant figures of his time; and thirty years later, Fernando del Pulgar wrote Claros varones de Castilla (1486), a shorter collection, including kings, counts, admirals, chancellors and prelates. In 1446, Álvaro de Luna completed the Libro de las virtuosas e claras mujeres, the only collection on women, with one hundred and seventeen portraits of figures from antiquity. In 1476, in the Crown of Aragon, Pere Miquel Carbonell composed in Latin De viris illustribus catalanis, a collection of fifteen Catalan humanists of his time. The main objective of the project is the publication of a monograph in English, which will be the first comprehensive contribution on the peninsular biographical genre in dialogue with its European context.
Selected publications
- 2024. “Tratados aparte, Collective Biographies in Fifteenth-Century Spain: The Case of Prelates in Fernán Pérez de Guzmán and Fernando del Puglar”, en Cécile Caby y Clémence Revest (eds.), Église(s) et vies des Grands hommes, Rome, Collection de l’École française de Rome (En curso de publicación).
- 2023. “Panorama de la traducción en el siglo xv”, Luis Pegenaute y Francisco Lafarga (eds.), Historia de la Traducción en España (En línea). https://phte.upf.edu/hte/alles-torrent/.
- 2021. “Digital Humanities and the Iberian Middle Ages”, en Michael Gerli y Ryan D. Giles (eds.), The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Medieval Iberia: Unity in Diversity, New York, Routledge, pp. 327-344.
- 2020. “Crítica textual y edición digital o ¿Dónde está la crítica en las ediciones digitales?”, Studia Aurea, 14, pp. 63-68. https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/studiaaurea.395.
