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 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.

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.