King's graduate wins prestigious PhD thesis prize

Our congratulations to Dr Maya Feile Tomes for winning the 2018-19 AHGBI (Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland) & Spanish Embassy Thesis Prize for her PhD. Her thesis, 'Neo-Latin America: the poetics of the "New World" in early modern epic. Studies in José Manuel Peramás's De Invento Novo Orbe Inductoque Illuc Christi Sacrificio (Faenza 1777)' also won the 2018 Hare Prize (in the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge).

Maya, who was a student at King's throughout both her undergraduate and graduate education, was also recently appointed as a Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, where she specialises in early modern Ibero-American literature. A classicist by training, she subsequently segued into comparative literature and now works at the intersection between Latin and Spanish. She has lived in Spain and Argentina and teaches across the Faculties of Modern and Medieval Languages (MML) and Classics.

Maya's next project, provisionally entitled Plurilingualising Poetics, investigates patterns of interaction between the various literary languages – Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Italian – involved in the production of colonial-era Iberian poetry. More broadly, her interests include Hispanic literature of all periods, classical reception (especially in non-hegemonic contexts), post- and decolonial theory, Columbus epics, the exilic literature of the eighteenth-century ex-Jesuits, literary cartography, and translation.