Imogen Choi

ics26@cam.ac.uk

College:

Trinity Hall

Research:

I worked as Teaching Associate in Spanish Golden Age and Colonial Studies at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese from January until December 2015, and am now completing my doctoral thesis, a study of the earliest surviving epic poetry written in what is now Peru over the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its main hypothesis is that this corpus of narrative poetry offers a way into the political imagination of the colonial metropolis during a time of intense transitions. All of these texts are involved in debates over the ethics of war, and this led them to consider how the nature of violence might vary according to the nature of the political community by or against whom it is perpetrated. The resulting investigation aims not only to elaborate a new perspective on colonial poetry and its relationship to the city of Lima and other parts of the Spanish empire, but to assess how these authors’ struggles with the unstable reality of contemporary conflict might add something to our understanding of the history of political thought.

I am also co-editing a book with Dr Rodrigo Cacho entitled The Rise of Spanish American Poetry 1500-1700: Literary and Cultural Transmission in the New World (Oxford: Legenda, 2017, http://www.legendabooks.com/titles/isbn/9781910887004.html), which arises from the colloquium 'Poets of the New World: Literary and Cultural Transmission in Early Modern Spanish America' held at Clare College in November 2015 (http://newworldpoets.wix.com/cambridge).

Fellowships:

Kluge Fellow, Library of Congress, DC (2014)
British Council Research Fellow, Huntington Library, CA (2013).

Academic Publications:

‘"De gente que a ningún rey obedecen": Republicanism and Empire in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana’, BHS 91.4 (2014), 417-35
‘¿"Adonde falta el rey, sobran agravios" (IV.5)? The Siege of Saint-Quentin and Two Worlds of War in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana’, in Stephen Boyd and Terence O’Reilly (eds) Artifice and Invention in the Spanish Golden Age (Oxford: Legenda, 2014)
‘Os lusíadas andArmas antárticas: Eros, Eris and the Art of Imitation in Colonial Epic’, in Rodrigo Cacho and Imogen Choi, ads, The Rise of Spanish American Poetry 1500-1700: Literary and Cultural Transmission in the New World [in preparation]
‘The Spectacle of Conquest: Epic Conflicts on the Seventeenth-Century Spanish Stage’,in Fiona Macintosh, ed., Epic Performances (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) [in preparation]
‘La presencia oculta de Torquato Tasso en la Tercera parte de La Araucana de Alonso de Ercilla (1589-90)’, Bulletin Hispanique, 2018 [in preparation]