Mary E. Barnard

Mary E. Barnard earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, with a specialization in the lyric poetry of early modern Spain. Her research interests include visual and material culture, the poetry of ruins, text and image in early modern print culture, and the interconnections of classical myth and cultural and intellectual history under the Habsburgs. She is the author of The Myth of Apollo and Daphne from Ovid to Quevedo: Love, Agon, and the Grotesque (Duke University Press). Her book, Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of Renaissance Europe (University of Toronto Press) was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book for 2015. As a pioneer of the “new poetry” of Renaissance Europe, aligned with the court, empire, and modernity, Garcilaso was fully attuned to the collection and circulation of luxury artifacts and other worldly goods. This volume explores how a variety of objects, including tapestries, paintings, statues, urns, mirrors, and relics served as sites of discourse for social networking, for engaging cultural memory, and for examining the connections between orality and writing, between history and the ideology of empire. She co-edited Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain (University of Toronto Press). Her latest book, A Poetry of Things: The Material Lyric in Habsburg Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2022) examines the works of poets whose use of visual and material culture contributed to the remarkable artistic and literary production in the reign of Philip III (1598–1621). Her co-edited collection, The Spatial Turn in the Literature and Art of Early Modern Spain, is in press, forthcoming December 2025. Her book, Spaces of Performance in the Culture of Imperial Spain, is in progress.

Her scholarly articles and reviews have appeared in PMLA, Renaissance Quarterly, Hispanic Review, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, among others, and she has contributed chapters to edited collections. She has received grants from the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Among her internal grants are an H. Rubinstein University Endowed Fellowship in the Humanities and a research fellowship from the Institute for the Arts and Humanities.