VI Cervantes Symposium of the Northeast: Call for Papers
The sixth Cervantes Symposium of the Northeast will be held on Friday and Saturday, November 5 and 6, 2027, at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Organized by Nicholas R. Jones (Yale University) and Eduardo Olid Guerrero (Muhlenberg College), the two-day program will combine invited keynote lectures and speakers with papers selected through this call. The topic of the symposium is
“Cervantes and the Urban Imagination.”
Cervantes wrote at a time when the cities of the Hispanic world grew faster than the institutions meant to govern them. Seville, port of the Indies, more than doubled its population during the sixteenth century; Madrid became the seat of a global monarchy after 1561; Naples, Algiers, Lisbon, Constantinople and Mexico City tied Iberian life to Mediterranean and Atlantic trade, captivity, and empire.
Cervantes knew most of these cities firsthand. He was born in Alcalá de Henares, lived in Valladolid, Seville, and Madrid, served as a soldier in Naples, and spent five years as a captive in Algiers. His fiction returns to them constantly: Monipodio's patio in Rinconete y Cortadillo, the Posada del Sevillano in La ilustre fregona, the Hospital de la Resurrección in Valladolid where Cipión and Berganza converse, the printing house and the beach of Barcelona in the second part of Don Quijote, the baños of Algiers, and the Lisbon and Rome of the Persiles.
Possible topics
Papers may address, among other subjects:
• Seville, Madrid, Toledo, Valladolid, and Barcelona in the Novelas ejemplares and Don Quijote
• Port cities of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic: Naples, Algiers, Constantinople, Lisbon, and the cities of the Indies
• Gender, the household, and women's movement through urban space
• The urban underworld: germanía, Monipodio's confraternity, prisons, brothels, and the picaresque
• Inns, markets, hospitals, and printing houses as places of exchange
• Race, religion, and community: Moriscos, conversos, and enslaved and free Black Africans in the early modern city
• Governance and the written city: notaries, secretaries, municipal law, and the villa of Barataria
• The city on stage: corrales de comedias, entremeses, festivals, and processions
• Court and village: rural views of the city and the menosprecio de corte tradition
• Sound, smell, and the sensory life of the early modern city
• Mapping Cervantes via digital and spatial approaches to his cities
• The afterlives of Cervantine cities in later literature, art, film, and urban memory
Submissions
Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words, with your name, institutional affiliation, and email address, to either of the organizers by March 1, 2027. Papers may be presented in English or Spanish and should not exceed twenty minutes. We welcome proposals from graduate students and early-career scholars as well as from senior faculty. Presenters may later develop their papers for anonymous peer review in a themed issue of Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America.
• Nicholas R. Jones, Yale University: nicholas.jones@yale.edu
• Eduardo Olid Guerrero, Muhlenberg College: eolid@muhlenberg.edu