Speakers:
- Ana Garriga y Veronica Tartabini
Former Fellow MIAS, CSIC - Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), MIAS
Casa de Velázquez
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Ana Garriga is a researcher specialising in the culture and written practices of the Hispanic early modern period. Since 2026, she has held a postdoctoral position at the Institute of Language, Literature and Anthropology of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), funded through a César Nombela Talent Attraction Fellowship. She received her PhD from Brown University in 2024 and her doctorate from the Autonomous University of Madrid in 2017. At the Autonomous University of Madrid, she defended her dissertation, Teresa de Jesús en el laberinto de sus cartas (Teresa of Jesus in the Labyrinth of Her Letters), for which she received the Extraordinary Doctoral Award.
Together with Carmen Urbita, she is the co-author of Instrucción de novicias. Vidas del convento barroco para guiar tu presente (Novice Training: Lives of the Baroque Convent to Guide Your Present) (Blackie Books, 2026) and the essay Oro líquido. Desorden literario, crisis y alquimia en la España del siglo XVII (Liquid Gold: Literary Disorder, Crisis and Alchemy in Seventeenth-Century Spain) (Alianza, 2026).
Veronica Tartabini is a researcher in Spanish philosophy, specialising in mysticism and the thought of María Zambrano. She currently teaches Spanish and Ibero-American Thought at the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts of the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and works as a project manager at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study (MIAS). She earned her PhD in Hispanic Studies from UAM, with the International Doctorate distinction, and in 2025 completed a postdoctoral research fellowship as a Stirling Maxwell Fellow at the University of Glasgow (United Kingdom).
She is the author of Carmelo Descalzo y Humanismo: itinerarios de hermosura y dignidad entre España e Italia (Discalced Carmel and Humanism: Paths of Beauty and Dignity between Spain and Italy) (Fonte, 2025). Her recent publications include «Humanismo místico desde Italia hacia España: Marsilio Ficino en diálogo con Teresa de Jesús y Juan de la Cruz en la encrucijada del neoplatonismo renacentista» (Rocinante, 2026) and «M. Zambrano y J.J. Rousseau: una unión mística con la naturaleza en consonancia con San Juan de la Cruz» (Brill, 2026). She has delivered lectures in several countries across Europe and the Americas.
In the first part of this seminar, conceived as a conversation around the voices, bodies, and forms of knowledge associated with the feminine in the Teresian universe, Dr. Ana Garriga will undertake a literary and historical exploration of the figures of Teresa of Jesus and her disciple María de San José. I am driven by an ardent desire, one that always burns in my heart, for the well-being of all my sisters, both those who are here now and those yet to come: few statements capture with such force the communal feminism and future-oriented hope that guided the work of the first generations of Discalced Carmelite nuns as this one, written by María de San José in her Advice from a Prioress to Another Whom She Had Raised. Through an interwoven narrative that seeks to bring Teresa of Jesus’s earliest didactic writings into dialogue with the legacy she sowed in her most distinguished disciple, María de San José, prioress of the Carmelite convent in Seville, this paper aims to open a conversation in search of transhistorical practices of resistance and marginal forms of writing that reveal alternative ways of understanding the production of knowledge in the early modern period.
In the second part of the seminar, Dr. Veronica Tartabini proposes a philosophical reflection on the feminine through a dialogue between the thought of Teresa of Ávila and that of María Zambrano. Her analysis explores the imprint of Teresa’s literary and spiritual teachings on Zambrano’s philosophy and shows how both thinkers belong to a Hispanic tradition that seeks to bring the sacred and the human, reason and the innermost depths of lived experience, into dialogue. From this perspective, Zambrano’s poetic reason emerges as a form of knowledge rooted in the maternal and connected to the Teresian legacy—a form of knowledge that embraces otherness and recognizes love as a path toward understanding and reconciliation. In contrast to a form of rationality that seeks to dominate reality through logic, this mode of knowing delves into the depths of existence to reveal the sacred nature of life and open up new avenues for understanding historical wounds, particularly those inflicted by the fratricidal violence of the Spanish Civil War. Zambrano engages in dialogue with key figures in the Hispanic spiritual and intellectual tradition, such as John of the Cross and Miguel de Unamuno, and recognizes Teresa of Ávila as an exceptional teacher of free thought and human dignity. Teresa thus embodies a form of wisdom that anticipates and resonates with Zambrano’s thought, a wisdom capable of transcending established oppositions and fostering a renewed encounter between the human heart and the heart of the universe.
