Dr. Alisa Tigchelaar

I enjoy investigating what literature reveals about society and people, and, concurrently, how it gives its readers a platform from which to dialogue about their own environments, ideas, and realities. I also enjoy teaching the Spanish language for a similar reason: the space that it gives its student speakers to broaden their cultural and relational perspectives. My own continuing study of the peoples that speak Castilian and their cultural production both informs my profession and my horizons. My scholarship is in the area of Early Modern Spanish religious literature. I deal mainly with the production of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish cloistered nuns, with an emphasis on what their literature reveals about their lives and the expression of their spirituality. Particular interests include contrasting the roles afforded secular women versus religious as suggested in their respective literary production.