AB, MTS, PhD, Harvard University

Professor Girón-Negrón was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico and has been teaching at Harvard since he obtained his doctoral degree in 1997. In his teaching and in his research, he seeks to elucidate the interplay between the languages and literatures of medieval Spain and to do so against the cultural backdrop of Iberian religious history. The bulk of his efforts have been devoted in particular to Spanish literary works from the Middle Ages through the 17th century. As a literary historian, Girón-Negrón is primarily interested in the formative impact of Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations on the premodern development of Ibero-Romance, Arabo-Andalusian and Hispano-Jewish belles lettres. Within medieval and early modern studies, his broader interests include mysticism and literature, approaches to lyric, Romance and Semitic historical linguistics, theory and practice of translation in the Middle Ages, medieval and Renaissance literary theory, comparative philology, religion and literature, oral poetics and multilingual aesthetics.

He is the author of Visión Deleytable: Philosophical Rationalism and the Religious Imagination in 15th Century Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2001), Las Coplas de Yosef: Entre la Biblia y el Midrash en la poesía judeoespañola (Madrid: Gredos, 2006-with Laura Minervini) and about three dozen articles and reviews. His current projects include an annotated edition and study of the 15th century Arragel Bible—an Old Spanish translation and commentary of the Hebrew Bible—with the generous support of an ACLS Fellowship, a forthcoming book on mysticism and literature in early modern Spain, and a collection of essays on translation in the Iberian Middle Ages.      

Professor Girón-Negrón has served on the Committee on the Study of Religion since 2007. He is also a Faculty Member of the Committee on Medieval Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for Jewish Studies. He is currently teaching and chairing the Department of Comparative Literature.