Julia Domínguez

Wolf Humanities Center Regional Fellow

20262027 Forum on Practice

Julia Domínguez

Professor of Spanish, Director of the Center for Global and Area Studies, Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Julia Domínguez is Professor of Spanish at the University of Delaware. Her research explores the intersections of memory studies, early modern Hispanic literature, Renaissance science, and the history of knowledge, with particular attention to the arts of memory and their influence on literary, intellectual, and cultural production in early modern Spain and Latin America. She is the author of Quixotic Memories: Cervantes and the Culture of Memory in Early Modern Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2022) and the editor of Mental Libraries: The Reception of the Arts of Memory in Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2025), as well as Cervantes in Perspective (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2013). She serves as Chair of the MLA Executive Committee for the 16th- and 17th-Century Spanish and Iberian Drama Forum, serves on the Board of Directors of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese and Delaware Humanities, and is general co-editor of the University of Delaware Press's Early Modern Exchange series.

Practicing Memory: Mnemonic Marvels in the Early Modern Hispanic World

This project examines the art of memory as a practiced intellectual discipline in early modern Spain and Latin America. Professor Domínguez's book, Mnemonic Marvels: The Arts of Memory in Early Modern Spain and Latin America, argues that memory was not understood as passive recall but as a cultivated skill developed through visualization, spatial imagination, and repeated mental exercises. Known historically as ars memoriae, mnemonic training functioned as a cognitive technology used to organize knowledge, shape ethical and political instruction, guide spiritual contemplation, and structure literary creation. Through case studies that include Garcilaso de la Vega, early modern pedagogical manuals, Spanish mysticism, colonial mnemonic systems such as Diego Valadés’s hybrid visual alphabets, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s philosophical poetry, the project reveals how memory operated as a cultural practice embedded in systems of learning, governance, religion, and artistic production. By recovering these traditions of mnemonic training, the project contributes to broader discussions about the practices through which humans organize knowledge and create meaning.