Research Fields: Spanish Literature (Medieval and Golden Age); Arabic and Hebrew Literatures (Middle Ages); History of Religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages); Historical Linguistics; Comparative Literature.

Professor Girón-Negrón was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico and has been teaching at Harvard since he obtained his doctoral degree in 1997. In his teaching and in his research, he seeks to elucidate the interplay between the languages and literatures of medieval Spain (Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese), and to do so against the cultural backdrop of Iberian religious history. The bulk of his efforts have been devoted in particular to Hispanic literary works from the Middle Ages through the 17th century. As a literary historian, Girón-Negrón is primarily interested in the formative impact of Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations on the premodern development of Ibero-Romance, Arabo-Andalusian and Hispano-Jewish belles lettres. Within medieval and early modern studies, his broader interests include mysticism and literature, approaches to lyric poetry, Romance and Semitic historical linguistics, theory and practice of translation in the Middle Ages, medieval and Renaissance literary theory, comparative philology, religion and literature, oral poetics, medieval and Sephardic Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish literature, and multilingual aesthetics.

He is the author of Visión Deleytable: Philosophical Rationalism and the Religious Imagination in 15th Century Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2001), Las Coplas de Yosef: Entre la Biblia y el Midrash en la poesía judeoespañola (Madrid: Gredos, 2006-with Laura Minervini) and about four dozen articles and reviews (see selected bibliography below). The first three volumes of an annotated edition and study of the Arragel Bible—an Old Spanish translation and commentary of the Hebrew Bible—developed with the generous support of an ACLS Fellowship, in collaboration with Andrés Enrique Arias, Javier Pueyo Mena, and the late Ángel Sáenz Badillos are forthcoming in 2024 in the Heterodoxia Iberica series for Brill (The Old Spanish Bible of Moshe Arragel: Volumes I [General Studies and Annotated Edition of the Codex’s Prologue], II [Genesis – Arragel’s Translation] and III [Genesis – Arragel’s Commentary]). His current projects include a bilingual edition of two Hispano-Jewish poets for the new subseries on medieval Iberia at the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (The Poems of Antón de Montoro and Rodrigo Cota), and a forthcoming book on mysticism and literature in early modern Iberia, with a focus on the Carmelite mystici maiori Santa Teresa de Ávila and San Juan de la Cruz, entitled El envés de lo inefable: estudios de literatura mística española.

Prof. Girón-Negrón is also a Faculty Member in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Committee on the Study of Religion, the Committee on Medieval Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Center for Jewish Studies. He is Faculty Adviser of the Puerto Rican Student Association (LaO), and he serves as well as Harvard’s representative for the Humanities at the Consejo Académico of the Real Colegio Complutense.

Education: A.B., M.T.S., PhD Harvard University

Major Publications:

Las Coplas de Yosef: Entre la Biblia y el Midrash en la poesía judeoespañola. (with Laura Minervini). Madrid: Gredos, 2006.

Alfonso de la Torre’s ‘Visión Deleytable’: Philosophical Rationalism and the Religious Imagination in 15th Century Spain. Leiden: Brill, 2001

Forthcoming Books:

The Old Spanish Bible of Moshe Arragel: Volumes I [General Studies and Annotated Edition of the Codex’s Prologue], II [Genesis – Arragel’s Translation], and III [Genesis – Arragel’s Commentary]. (with Ángel Sáenz-Badillos, Andrés Enrique-Arias, and Francisco Javier Pueyo Mena). Leiden: Brill, 2024.

The Poems of Antón de Montoro and Rodrigo Cota. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

El envés de lo inefable: estudios de literatura mística española. Madrid: Iberoamericana / Vervuert, 2024.

Selected Recent Articles:

“Paradoxes of Desire in St. John of the Cross and Solomon ibn Gabirol: Thinking with Poetry in Comparative Theology.” The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Comparative Theology: A Collection in Honor of Francis X. Clooney. Alex Marc Oaks Takács and Joseph Kimmel (eds.). Hoboken NJ: Wiley-Blackwell (2024): 345-369.

“Traducción y exégesis en las Biblias romanceadas.” Anuario de estudios medievales 53/1 (2023): 297-324. https://estudiosmedievales.revistas.csic.es/index.php/estudiosmedievales/article/view/1368

“Del éxtasis al ajedrez en la mística española: dos imágenes de Santa Teresa, con un guiño a Lope de Vega.” Lope de Vega 1622: Cuatro españoles y un santo. eds. Jesús R. Folgado García and Manuel Parada López de Corselas (Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid, 2022), 92-119.

“Allí se puso este Libro de la Ley: Breve reflexión sobre una glosa exegética al Deuteronomio 31 en la Biblia romanceada de Moshe Arragel.” Magnificat Cultura i Literatura Medievals. 9 (2022): 213-219. http://ojs.uv.es/index.php/MCLM

““Ya, ya se abren las flores”: la lírica de Santa Teresa en la historia literaria de la mística cristiana.” Hispania Sacra 72/146 (2020): 409-426.

““Sobre los montes de los bugíos”: Distorted Echoes of Saadia’s Tafsīr in the Old Spanish Bibles of the 15^th Century.” Revue des Études Juives 179, 3/4 (2020): 399-416.

“Pedro de Toledo’s Mostrador e enseñador de los turbados: The Christian Reception of Maimonides’s Guide in 15^th Century Spain.” The Guide of the Perplexed in Translation: A History of the Translations of Maimonides’s Guide and Their Impact, from Medieval Times to the Present, eds. Joseph Stern, James Robinson and Yonatan Tzvi Shemesh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019) 141-179.

“Maimónides romanceado: Apuntes sobre la Visión Deleitable y la recepción de la Guía en la España cuatrocentista.” Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía. 35/3 (2018): 599-615.

“La clerecía rabínica: siglos XIV y XV.” Historia de la métrica medieval castellana, coord. Fernando Gómez Redondo (San Millán de la Cogolla: CILENGUA, 2016) 275-301.

“La hoguera y la mariposa: rara fortuna de una antigua metáfora en la mística española”, Una nueva visión de literatura y arte. Actas del congreso internacional de literatura mística, ed. Diana Torres Rivera (Ponce, Puerto Rico: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Puerto Rico, 2014) 217-267.

“Islamic and Jewish Influences”, chapter 13 of Dante in Context, eds. Lino Pertile and Zygmunt Baranski (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015) 200-220.

“De la Biblia de Arragel a la Políglota Complutense”, La Biblia Políglota Complutense y su Contexto, ed. Antonio Alvar Ezquerra (Alcalá de Henares 2016) 87-104.

“Huellas hebraicas en la poesía del Marqués de Santillana.” In Encuentros and Desencuentros: Spanish Jewish Cultural Interactions. Carlos Carrete Parrondo et al (eds). Tel Aviv: University Publishing Projects, 2000. pp. 161-211.

“La maldición del can: la polémica antijudía en el Libro del caballero Zifar.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Liverpool), 78.3 (2001): 275-295.

“Tassels or Skirts? Some Notes on a Lexicographic Gloss in the General estoria.” Romance Philology, 54 (2001): 331-350.

” ‘Commo a cuerpo santo’: el prólogo del Zifar y los furta sacra hispano-latinos.” Bulletin Hispanique, 102.2 (2001): 345-368.

” ‘Your dove-eyes among your hairlocks’: Language and Authority in Fray Luis de León’s Respuesta que desde su prisión da a sus émulos.” Renaissance Quarterly Studies, 54.4 (2001): 1197-1250.

“Muerte, cates / que non cates”: el “discor” 510 de fray Diego de Valencia en el Cancionero de Baena.” Revista de Filología Española, 82 (2002): 249-272.

“El canto del ave: música y éxtasis en la Cantiga de Santa María 103.” In Literatura y espiritualidad. María Pilar Manero (ed). Barcelona, (2003) 35-59.

“El laberinto y sus reveses en Juan de Mena.” Medioevo Romanzo 28 (2004):129-166.

“How the Go-Between Cut Her Nose: Two Ibero-Medieval Translations of a Kalilah wa-Dimnah Story.” In Under the Influence. Leyla Rouhi and Cynthia Robinson (eds). Leiden: Brill, 2005 pp. 231-259.

“En el corazón del Quijote: la cuestión de la épica en prosa” (with Francisco Márquez-Villanueva), Spain’s Multicultural Legacies – Studies in Honor of Samuel G. Armistead. Adrienne Martín y Cristina Martínez-Carazo (eds.). Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 2008. pp. 96-120.

“Dionysian Thought in 16th Century Spanish Mystical Theology,” Re-thinking Dionysius the Areopagite, eds. Sarah Coakley and Charles Stang (Wiley-Blackwell 2009), 163-176.

“Fortune ibero-medieval d’une epigramme arabe,” Horizons Maghrébins 61 (2010): 49-62.

“‘Juro al Deu aí somos nós’: Some Notes on Gil Vicente’s Jews and the Spanish and Portuguese cancione[i]ros” La Corónica 40 (2011): 243-293.

“ ‘Mi alma tuvo sed de ti’: San Juan de la Cruz y sus dos versiones del Psalmo 62:2” La Biblia en la literatura del Siglo de Oro, eds. Ignacio Arellano y Ruth Fine (Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert-Universidad de Navarra, 2010) 207-240.

“Weeping Over Rachel’s Tomb: Literary Reelaborations of a Midrashic Motif in Medieval and Early Modern Spain” The Hebrew Bible in Fifteenth-Century Spain: Exegesis, Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts eds. Jonathan Decter and Arturo Prats Oliván (Brill: Leiden, 2012) 13-40.