Department Chair / Professor of Comparative Literature
PhD Romance Languages (Spanish), Princeton University
MA Spanish, University of Wisconsin-Madison
AB Comparative Literature, Smith College
Bio
A Professor of Comparative Literature, Marsha S. Collins specializes in the literature of Early Modern Europe, especially the Literature of Early Modern Spain in its European context. Her research focuses on romance and other idealizing fictional forms, literature and the visual arts, early modern lyric poetry, and Early Modern European court culture. She has written on romance, pastoral, ekphrasis, and early modern subjectivity, among other topics, as well as on authors such as Cervantes, Unamuno, Galdós, Góngora, Lope, and others. She is currently writing a book with the title “Novel Friendships: Amity and Community in Cervantes’s Don Quijote.”
Publications:
- Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance (New York: Routledge, 2016)
- “Metaphor and Matter(s) Arising: Gongorine Metaphor and the Cultivation of the Imagination.” Co-authored with Isabel Torres. Bulletin of Spanish Studies 93.7-8(2016): 1129-56.
- “Playing with Time: Asynchronicity in Don Quijote.” Cervantes 36.1(2016): 39-65.
- “Pastoral Fiction: Paradigms of Paradox and Innovation.” Oxford Handbook of Golden Age
- Spanish Literature. Ed. Juan Antonio Garrido Ardila. Oxford: Oxford UP, in press.
- “Befriending and Being Friends in Cervantes’ La Galatea (1585) and Sidney’s Arcadia (1593).”
- Cervantes in the New Millennium. Ed. Bruce Burningham. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2020, 81-105.
- “Romance.” Palgrave Macmillan Handbook on Philosophy and Literature. Ed. Barry Stocker and Michael Mack. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 263-91.
- “Lauso, a Portrait of the Poet in Cervantes’ La Galatea.” Symposium 72.3 (2018): 138-48.
- “Romance.” Palgrave Macmillan Handbook on Philosophy and Literature. Ed. Barry Stocker and Michael Mack. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 263-91.
Teaching Awards
- John L. Sanders Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Service (2000).
Awards
- Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education (2016-2018)
- Marcel Bataillon Distinguished Term Professor of Comparative Literature (2009-2014)
- Fellow of the UNC Institute for the Arts and Humanities
- Fulbright Fellowship for Study in Spain
Courses Taught:
- CMPL 121 Great Books I: Romancing the World
- CMPL 122 Great Books I: Literature and the Visual Arts
- CMPL 223 Global Cervantes
- CMPL 275 Literature of Pilgrimage
- CMPL 454 Literature of the Continental Renaissance
- CMPL 462 Realism