Chloe Wheeler is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature. Her dissertation project Dangerous Readers, Found(ational) Texts: A Study of Early Modern Spanish Imaginaries of Literacy traces a cultural history of the representations of readable spaces and literate individuals in territories under the control of Iberian Empire from the 16th and 17th centuries, with a particular attention to the afterlives of the following genres: the religious treatise, the historia verdadera, the epic poem, the confessional narrative, and the medieval drama moros y cristianos. She works with materials in Spanish, Aljamiado, Arabic, Portuguese, and ancient Greek; her linguistic studies and archival work have brought her to Mexico, Spain, Uruguay, Morocco, Jordan, and California.
Beyond her research, she is deeply committed to building communities of thinkers both in the classroom and in her field: she has taught Spanish 101 and 107, precepted for History 306 ("Becoming Latino in the U.S."), worked as a Writing Center Fellow, and choreographed for the undergraduate tap dance group TapCats since 2022; currently, she is co-designing a course on censorship and book burning in the Hispanophone world. She has also organized the following conferences, collaborating and fundraising across departments at Princeton: “Mediated Spiritualities," (COM, Spring 2024); “Indelible Footprints in Spain,” (SPO, Fall 2024); "Early Modern Discontinuities,” (SPO, Fall 2024).
Before starting her Ph.D., she was awarded a 2019-2020 Fulbright Spain (Galicia) ETA Fellowship as well as a 2021-2022 Fulbright Spain Predoctoral Research Fellowship. She holds a B.A. in Spanish and Comparative Literature from Occidental College (2019) and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Classics from UCLA (2021).
Selected Publications
"The Tabloids of Torquemada: Shape-Shifting Women and Confessions in the Jardín de flores curiosas (1570)." Humanities Special Issue, "Curiosity in Early Modern Iberia," (forthcoming in 2025).
“Los muladares y las mujeres: Subaltern Spaces of Self-Abjection in the Spiritual Diary of Úrsula de Jesús.” Hispanic Review, vol. 92, no. 4, 2024, pp. 667-689, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/947985.
“A Morriña.” PensaLugo no. 3, August 2020.
Conference Papers
"Lisbon as a spatio-visual turning point in Cervantes’ Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617)." Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 2024 Annual Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, July 10, 2024.
“Banquet tables and tablas in Canto XIII of Pedro de Oña’s El Arauco domado.” Renaissance Society of America 2024 Meeting, Chicago, IL, March 21, 2024.
“Theoretical Tamthīl: Aesthetics and Performance in al-Jurjānī’s Asrār al-balāgha.” Stanford Arabic Literature PhD Scholars Colloquium, Stanford, CA, April 2023.
“Muladares y mujeres: Subaltern Spaces of Self-Abjection in the Spiritual Diary of Úrsula de Jesús.” Renaissance Society of America 2023 Meeting, San Juan, Puerto Rico, March 10, 2023.
“Unreliable, Multilingual Intermediaries: Trotaconventos and the Mora’s Refusal in Juan Ruiz’s Libro de Buen Amor.” Medieval Academy of America 98th Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., February 24, 2023.
“From His Lips Fell Shells: Represented Madness in the Choral Language of Mrs. Dalloway’s Septimus Warren Smith.” University at Buffalo’s 11th Annual Romance Languages and Literature Graduate Conference, Zoom, April 9, 2022.