Dr Maya Feile Tomes

Degrees       

MA (Cantab.), MPhil (Cantab.), PhD (Cantab.)

Awards & Prizes:             

• Association of Hispanists of Great Britain & Ireland (AHGBI) and Spanish Embassy Doctoral Dissertation Prize – 2018-19
• Hare Prize for Doctoral Thesis, Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge – 2018
• Chancellor’s Medal for Classical Learning, University of Cambridge – 2011

Research Interests:             

Early modern (colonial-era) Ibero-American literature, the transatlantic world, poetry and poetics, translation, classical reception, postcolonial approaches to Classics and to literature in general, the ethics of teaching and research

Biography:         

Maya Feile Tomes is the Lorna Close Fellow in Spanish at Murray Edwards and Director of Studies in Modern & Medieval Languages and Linguistics (MMLL) at Peterhouse. She comes to Murray Edwards from King’s College (where she was an undergraduate and graduate student) via Christ’s College (where she was Junior Research Fellow in Classics and Modern Languages) and the MMLL Faculty (where she was Teaching Associate in Colonial Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies). To Cambridge itself she comes via Scotland, Germany, Spain, Argentina and Belgium. With a background in Classics, she now specialises in the literary culture of the Ibero-American world during the early modern period (C16th–18th), focusing on transatlantic literary dialogues, multilingual textual dynamics, the poetics of space, and the representation of the new in the terms of the old (and vice versa). She teaches widely across undergraduate and graduate papers in the Spanish & Portuguese Section, as well as in the Faculty of Classics, where she convenes an MPhil module in classical reception. She also has extensive experience as a translator and continues to moonlight, when time permits, as an interpreter in the health sector. In short, Maya is interested in facilitating dialogue of every sort and is always pleased to hear from anyone interested in discussing any of the above or anything else relating to the study of Spanish/MMLL at Murray Edwards.

Publications:     

Books

• Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas, eds Maya Feile Tomes, Adam J. Goldwyn and Matthew Duquès. Leiden/Boston: Brill (2021).
• Sepúlveda on the Conquest of the Indies, eds Luke Glanville, David Lupher and Maya Feile Tomes. Oxford: OUP (forthcoming).
• Columbus Sails in the 1770s: A Late Iberian Epic on the Discovery of the New World. Translation and Commentary of José Manuel Peramás’s “De Invento Novo Orbe Inductoque Illuc Christi Sacrificio” (1777), ed. and trans. Maya Feile Tomes with Bram van der Velden (in preparation).
• Neo-Latin America: The Poetics of the “New World” in Early Modern Epic. Támesis (under contract).

Chapters and articles

• 2023. ‘Neo-Latin and the New World’, Brill Research Perspectives in Latinity and Classical Reception in the Early Modern Period (in preparation).
• 2022a. ‘A Lady of Letters? Re-Mythologising “Clarinda” in the light of Ovid. Putting the Discurso en loor de la  poesía back into the Parnaso Antártico (1608)’, Colonial Latin American Review (forthcoming).
• 2022b. ‘Worldmaking in the Round: Shields, Maps, America’, in Cosmographies of Greece and Rome, eds Renaud Gagné and Aaron Kachuck. Cambridge: CUP (in preparation).
• 2021a. ‘The Other Arena: Poetics Goes Global in the Early Modern Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1650(+)’, in Artes Poeticae: Formations and Transformations, 1500-1650, eds Micha Lazarus and Vladimir Brljak, special issue of Classical Receptions Journal 13.1, 126–48.
• 2021b. ‘Introduction. Synecdoche in Reverse: America’s Transhemispheric Classics’, pp. 1–49 in Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas, eds Maya Feile Tomes, Adam J. Goldwyn and Matthew Duquès. Leiden/Boston: Brill.
• 2021c. ‘Carthaginian America: Transatlantic First Encounters in Early Modern Epic’, Classical First Contacts Across the Globe, ed. Erik Hermans, special issue of International Journal of the Classical Tradition (forthcoming).
• 2020. ‘Plurilingual Poetry and the Hinterland of Intertextuality: Europeanising Reading Culture in the Early Modern Iberian World’, pp. 227–48 in The Edinburgh History of Reading – vol. 1: Early Readers, ed. Mary Hammond. Edinburgh: EUP.
• 2019a. ‘The Angel and Ameri(c)a: Performing the “New World” in José Manuel Peramás’s De Invento Novo Orbe (1777)’, pp. 121–46 in Changing Hearts: Performing Jesuit Emotions between Europe, Asia and the Americas, eds Yasmin Haskell and Raphaële Garrod. Leiden/Boston: Brill.
• 2019b.  ‘“All the World’s a…”: Mapping the Shield of Aeneas’, Omnibus 77, 1-3.
• 2018. ‘Südamerika: Die spanischsprachigen Länder’, pp. 920–32 in Der neue Pauly. Das 18. Jahrhundert: Lexikon zur Antikerezeption in Aufklärung und Klassizismus, eds Joachim Jacob and Johannes Süßmann. Stuttgart/Weimar: J. B. Metzler.
• 2015a. ‘News of a Hitherto Unknown Neo-Latin Columbus Epic – Part I: José Manuel Peramás’s De Invento Novo Orbe Inductoque Illuc Christi Sacrificio (1777)’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 22.1, 1–28.
• 2015b. ‘News of a Hitherto Unknown Neo-Latin Columbus Epic – Part II: José Manuel Peramás’s De Invento Novo Orbe Inductoque Illuc Christi Sacrificio (1777)’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 22.2, 223–57.
• 2015c. ‘Further Points on Peramás: An Erratum and two Addenda’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 22.3, 383–9.
• 2015d. ‘Dos manuscritos catalanes y dos Ferrer barceloneses: el caso de los MSS 541 y 543 del C.R.A.I. Biblioteca de Reserva’, Dipòsit Digital de la Universitat de Barcelona.

Reviews

• 2019. Review of Andrew Laird and Nicola Miller (eds), Antiquities and Classical Traditions in Latin America (Wiley, 2018), Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR 2019.12.40).
• 2017a. Review of Robert Goodwin, Spain: The Centre of the World, 1519-1682 (Bloomsbury, 2015), History 102.3, 503–6.
• 2017b. Review of Shane Butler (ed.), Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception (Bloomsbury, 2016),  Classical Review 67.2, 561–3.
• 2015. Review of Christiane Pérez González, Bilingualität auf der Jesuitenbühne. Latein und Volkssprache im spanischen Schultheater des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Rhema, 2014), Journal of Jesuit Studies 2.2, 329–32.