Dr Rebecca De Souza

I joined Stirling as a Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies in the Division of Literature and Languages in September 2022. Previously I was an Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Romance Philology of the Freie Universität Berlin (2021-2022), and I completed a DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford in 2021.

My research interests broadly fall under postcolonial and diasporic memory studies and border studies. I have published on medieval and early modern Iberian literature and culture as well as on neomedievalisms in the Hispanophone world, and I am currently completing a monograph on the cultural memory of medieval Iberia in modern Spain.

I am willing to supervise PhD projects on any topics relating to my research areas, and particularly on the global Hispanophone, medievalism and/or medieval Iberian studies. I lecture and teach on topics across all years of the undergraduate programme in SPLAS and in 2023/24 I am coordinating Honours modules for third and final year students.

In the wider Division, I convene the Literature & Languages Research Seminar and am also a member of the Postcolonial Studies and Heritage Research Groups.

I am currently co-editor-in-chief of the journal postmedieval, which publishes theoretically driven scholarship on premodernity and its ongoing reverberations. See: http://www.palgrave.com/gp/journal/41280 for further information.

My research interests span Hispanophone literature and culture from the medieval to the modern period and are focused on the cultural memory of al-Andalus.

My monograph, Memories of Colonisation in Medieval and Modern Castile: Rereading and Refashioning al-Andalus (under contract with OUP), sits at the intersection of postcolonial and memory studies. This book examines how and why a medieval legend that narrates Christian Iberia’s disempowerment and domination by a superior Islamic polity (al-Andalus) was repeatedly rewritten once the reverse colonial dynamic had taken hold.

I also work on postcolonial and diasporic responses to medieval and early modern Iberian culture. I have published on neomedievalism in Argentina and have forthcoming publications on Sephardic and Philippine poetry, as well as on the portrayal of the Inquisition in US cinema. In 2023 I was awarded a Carnegie Trust Research Incentive Grant for the project "Living out the Past: Medievalised Self-Fashioning and Postcolonial Memory in Colombia & Argentina" which involves the study of the growing phenomenon of medieval re-enactment across Latin America.

In addition to this, I am developing a second, large, comparative project on historical memory in postcolonial and diasporic poetry that interrogates the persistence of oral ballads in border zones.