Heather Bamford

Associate Professor of Spanish Literature

Contact:

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 between 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. Heather is the author of Cultures the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian
Manuscript, 1100–1600 (University of Toronto Press, 2018), winner of the 2020 La corónica
International Book Award for best monograph published in the field of medieval Spain in 2018.
Her current monograph project, under contract with the University of Toronto Press, is titled
Unprinted: Reading and Meaning in Early Modern Iberia. It critiques the fundamental tenets of
book history through the religious, racial, and linguistic complexities of early modern Iberia and
its manuscripts. Heather’s next project centers on the legal code Las siete partidas and
slavery in Spain and the Americas. Heather Bamford has been a member of the MLA
Committee on Scholarly Editions and currently serves on the Advisory Board for the journal
Scholarly Editing. She was a GW Humanities Center fellow for the 2020-21 academic year and
at present is a GW Faculty Senator for the GW Columbian College of Arts and Sciences.

Publications

Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100–1600. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2018.

“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.
Leiden: Brill, 2023, pp. 37-58.

“Meaning and Reading in the Proverbs of El Conde Lucanor.” Revista de Estudios
Hispánicos, vol. LV, no. 3, October 2021, pp. 777-797.

“Amulet, Talisman, and Intention in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia.” Revista Hispánica
Moderna, vol. 72, no. 2, December 2021, pp.133-148.

With Emily Francomano. “Whose Digital Middle Ages? Accessibility in Digital Medieval
Manuscript Culture.” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, January 2022.

“Fragment and Referent in Material Texts Identified as the Libro de buen amor.” La
corónica, vol. 47, no. 1, 2018, pp. 9-36.

With Emily Francomano. “On “Digital-Medieval Manuscript Culture”: A Tentative
Manifesto,” Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures, vol. 7, no. 1, Spring 2018,
pp. 29-45.

“Magic, Reading, and Meaning in Early Modern Iberian Manuscript Text.”
eHumanista/Conversos, vol. 6, Fall 2018, pp. 403-418.

In preparation:

Unprinted: Reading and Meaning in Early Modern Iberia, under contract with the University of
Toronto Press.

With Alberto Montaner. Companion to Aljamiado Literature with Alberto Montaner. Leiden:
Brill.