Heather Bamford
Heather Bamford
Associate Professor of Spanish Literature, Director of Spanish Literature
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Email:
Heather Bamford
Office Phone:
(202) 994-6966
Heather Bamford studies and teaches the literatures and cultures of medieval and early modern Iberia, with a focus on the intersections of religion, magic, and law in multiconfessional Iberia and its legacy today. She earned her B.A. in Spanish at the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley.
She is the author of Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100–1600 (University of Toronto Press, 2018), which won the 2020 La corónica International Book Award for the best monograph published in the field of medieval Spain. Her current book project, Unprinted: Reading and Meaning in Early Modern Iberia (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming December 2025), critiques the fundamental tenets of book history through the religious and linguistic complexities of early modern Iberia and its manuscripts.
Her next project examines the legal code Las siete partidas in Spain and the Americas through a series of case studies spanning the premodern and modern periods. She has served as a member of the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions and is currently co-executive editor of Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures (Johns Hopkins University Press) with Emily Francomano (Georgetown University). Heather is the director of the Program in Spanish and Latin American Literatures and Cultures at GW.
Books
- Unprinted: Reading and Meaning in Early Modern Iberia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming December 2025.
- Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100–1600. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018.
Articles and Book Chapters“
- "Magic and Miracle in the Cantigas de Santa Maria.” La corónica 51, no. 1 (July 2024):173-195.
- “Reading in Iberian Magic Texts.” In Vernacular Books and Their Readers in the Early Age of Print (c. 1450–1600), edited by John Thompson, Andrea van Leerdam, and Anna Dlabacova, 37–58. Leiden: Brill, 2023.
- “Meaning and Reading in the Proverbs of El Conde Lucanor.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 55, no. 3 (October 2021): 777–97.
- “Amulet, Talisman, and Intention in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 72, no. 2 (December 2021): 133–48.
- With Emily Francomano. “Whose Digital Middle Ages? Accessibility in Digital Medieval Manuscript Culture.” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 14, no. 1 (January 2022).
- “Fragment and Referent in Material Texts Identified as the Libro de buen amor.” La corónica 47, no. 1 (2018): 9–36.
- With Emily Francomano. “On ‘Digital-Medieval Manuscript Culture’: A Tentative Manifesto.” Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures 7, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 29–45.
- “Magic, Reading, and Meaning in Early Modern Iberian Manuscript Text.” eHumanista/Conversos 6 (Fall 2018): 403–18.
Recent book reviews in Hispanic Review, The Medieval Review, Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures, Catalan Review, and Speculum.
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