Ana Bravo Gomez: Food and Racial Profiling in Fifteenth Century Spain

Professor Gómez-Bravo received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. Her main research areas are medieval and early modern Spanish literature, rhetoric and poetics, and theories of ethnic and gender difference. Professor Gómez-Bravo’s forthcoming book with the University of Toronto Press is entitled Textual Agency: Writing Culture and Social Networks in Fifteenth-Century Spain. The book shows the intersecting relevance of different types of material support in the formation of the book of poetry and the creation of a strong authorial self through the process of compilation. Authorial and textual agencies are competing forces in the midst of the institution of the Inquisition, the advent of the absolutist state, the growth of cities and the constitution of the Spanish nation. A study of the contributions of converso poets displays the ways in which all these different forces provided a conflictive albeit fertile ground for literary activity. 

Currently, Professor Gómez-Bravo is working on a book-length project on the relation between food and ethnic identity, and in particular the attention paid by the Inquisition to food practices of Jews and Muslims leading to the exercise of racial profiling. She is also studying the ways in which these inquisitorial methods were applied in later centuries to other groups such as Native Americans and ethnic minorities.

Professor Gómez-Bravo has received grants and fellowships from the following sources: National Endowment for the Humanities, American Philosophical Society, Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain and US Universities, Purdue University, and UC Berkeley. Her work has appeared in Rhetorica, Hispanic Review, Romance Philology, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Hispania and La Corónica, among others.