Victoria Marie Muñoz, PhD

Scholar of early modern English and Spanish literature, empire, & colonialism

Did Spanish explorers really discover the sunken city of Atlantis or one of the lost tribes of Israel in Mesoamerica? Did classical writers foretell the discovery of America? Were faeries and Amazons hiding in Guiana, and where was the fabled golden city, El Dorado? Who was more powerful, Apollo or Diana, and which claimant nation, Spain or England, would win the game of empire? These were some of the questions English writers, historians, and polemicists asked through their engagement with Spanish romance. By exploring England’s fanatical consumption of these tales of love and arms as reflected in the works of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Ben Jonson, and Peter Heylyn, this book shows how the idea of English empire took root in and through literature, and how these circumstances primed the success of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote of la Mancha in England.

SCHOLARLY PROFILE

Dr. Victoria Muñoz is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at The City University of New York Eugenio María de Hostos Community College and a 2022 Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellow. Her research specialties are Shakespeare and the English Renaissance, romance literature and the Anglo-Spanish War, early modern European literature and drama, and the history of fairy tales. Her first book, Spanish Romance in the Battle for Global Supremacy: Tudor and Stuart Black Legends was published in 2021 by Anthem Press's World Epic and Romance series

For a book excerpt, see Dr. Muñoz's post on the Folger Shakespeare Library's Shakespeare & Beyond blog: "More strange than true": Finding America among the faeries. For recent reviews, see Sederi: Spanish and Portuguese Society of English Renaissance Studies Yearbook (no. 32), Renaissance Quarterly (no. 75.4), and The Spenser Review (no. 52.3).The book was also covered on the Academic Minute / Inside Higher Ed.

vmunoz@hostos.cuny.edu