BA (Hons) (Kent), MSt (Oxon), MLitt (Oxon), MA (Cantab) PhD (London), HEA Senior Fellow

Associate Dean (Recruitment and Global), Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

Deputy Head of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Associate Editor of the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, of the Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies and Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of La Perinola

Arantza Mayo arrived at Royal Holloway following teaching stints at Oxford and a University Lectureship at the University of Cambridge, where she also served as Fellow of Corpus Christi College.

Arantza specialises in early modern literature, art and culture across Spain and colonial America, with particular focus on religion; she works with poetry, hagiography, devotional texts as well as visual works and material artifacts. She also has expertise in Bolivian literature and culture, in particular twentieth-century poetry and the socio-political contexts of its production.

She is currently researching suffering as spiritual currency to explore early modern preoccupations with sanctity, status and power in the Hispanic World. She is particularly interested in self-inflicted pain and the cultural frameworks that made resilient distress valuable in the 16th and 17th centuries. Her work focuses on how suffering bodies became sites of religious performance, political negotiation, and cultural meaning-making: what constituted legitimate suffering? who was authorized to suffer and where? and how did pain confer moral authority?

Her current projects —a critical edition of an epic hagiography by Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo on Juana de la Cruz and a volume on Teresa of Ávila— examine how pain and sanctity were narrated, performed, and politicized in the case of early modern women.

Arantza has won prizes for her research (the prestigious ‘Premio Conde de Cartagena’, awarded by the Real Academia Española) as well as her teaching (a 'College Teaching Fellowship Award', a Students' Union ‘Apple for the Teacher’ award plus a further nomination for the same prize).

Early Modern Spanish and Spanish American Literature

Early Modern Religious Literature, Visual Arts and Material Culture in the Hispanic World

Bolivian Poetry

Arantza welcomes proposals for postgraduate study in any of her fields of study.

Arantza enjoys teaching modules on Early Modern Literature and Visual Arts in Spain and Colonial America. She also teaches 20th-century Latin American Literature and Culture.

SN1105 Journeys of Identity

SN1109 Discovery, Subversion and Destruction in the Hispanic World

SN2118  From Public Display to Private Devotion: Religion and Society in the 16^th- and 17^th-century Hispanic World

SN 2124/3119 Conflict in Latin American Literature and Culture

SN2107/3107 Deceit, Desire and the Self in the Early Modern Hispanic World

ML1301 Visual Arts 1: Artists and their Materials

ML2302 Visual Arts 2: Genres and Movements

SN1400: Spanish Language: Culture and Translation

SN2400: Advanced Spanish Translation: Skills and Practice