Joint Appointment, Department of English

Trained as a comparatist (English, Spanish, French, Italian), Professor Fuchs works on European cultural production from the late fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, with a special emphasis on literature and empire, and on theater and performance in transnational contexts. As part of her commitment to the public humanities and collaborative work, she directs the UCLA “Diversifying the Classics” initiative and edits the series “The Comedia in Translation and Performance” for Juan de la Cuesta. She is also director of LA Escena, Los Angeles’ biennial festival of Hispanic classical theater, founded in 2018. Currently, Professor Fuchs serves as one of the articles editors for Renaissance Quarterly.

Professor Fuchs’ recent books include Knowing Fictions: Picaresque Reading in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Penn 2021); The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs (Juan de la Cuesta 2021), a collaborative translation of Ana Caro’s Valor, agravio y mujer; and The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe (Toronto 2020), co-edited with Mercedes García-Arenal. She is also one of the editors for the Norton Anthology of World Literature (2012, 2018). Her Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a time of Pandemic, one of the first studies of how theater was transformed by COVID-19, was published by Methuen in September 2021. She is currently working on a translation and critical edition of Ginés Pérez de Hita’s Las guerras civiles de Granada with Payton Phillips Quintanilla.

In 2021, Professor Fuchs served as President of the Modern Language Association. She was recently awarded the inaugural “Premio Ñ” from the Instituto Cervantes, for the promotion of Spanish language and culture.

Professor Fuchs teaches courses on theater, performance, and identity; cultural encounters in Mediterranean and transatlantic contexts; Cervantes; the picaresque; and more. She is happy to work with undergraduate and graduate students on any aspect of early modern studies, translation, or transhistorical performance studies.

Education

  • Ph.D. (1997) Comparative Literature, Stanford University
  • B.A./M.A. (1992) Comparative Literature (English, French, Spanish) (summa cum laude), Yale University

Research

  • Early Modern Spanish and English literature
  • Mediterranean and transatlantic studies
  • Literature and empire
  • Transnationalism and literary history
  • Race and religion in the early modern world
  • Translation and performance

Books

Articles

  • “The Devil in a Rich Country: the English Reception of the Conquest of Mexico,” in Peter Villella and Pablo García Loaeza, eds., The Conquest of Mexico: 500 Years of Reinvention. Forthcoming, U. of Oklahoma Press.
  • “A Lettered Utopia: Printed Alphabets and the Material Republic of Letters,” with Philip Palmer, Renaissance Quarterly 73.4 (Dec. 2020): 1-42.
  • “Crusoe’s Absence,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 49 (2020): 27-42.
  • “Staged Work: Intermediality and the Labor of Performance in Christiane Jatahy’s Julia and Kid Koala’s Nufonia Must Fall,” Theatre Journal 71.2 (June 2019): 153-169.
  • “Black Faces, White Hands: La celosa de si misma and the Negotiation of Race,” Modern Language Notes, 133.2 (March 2018): 242-256.
  • “Ruinations: Petrach in Rome, Navagero in Granada,” in Al-Andalus y la identidad española, eds. Antonio Cortijo Ocaña and Jesús Torrecilla, eHumanista 37, Fall 2017.
  • “Diversifying the Classics: Adapting Hispanic Classical Theater to Contemporary Los Angeles,” Comedia Performance, 2017.
  • “Suspended Judgments: Scepticism and the Pact of Fictionality in Cervantes’s Picaresque Novellas,” MLQ 76.4 (December 2015): 447-463.
  • “Another Turn for Transnationalism: Empire, Nation, and Imperium in Early Modern Studies,” PMLA 130.2 (March 2015): 412-418.
  • “Ventriloquist Theater and the Omniscient Narrator: Gatz and El pasado es un animal grotesco,” Modern Drama 57.2 (Summer 2014): 165-186.
  • “No Field is an Island: Postcolonial and Transnational Approaches to Early Modern Drama,” What Is Renaissance Drama?, ed. Jeffrey Masten and William N. West, Renaissance Drama, New Series 40 (2012): 125-133.
  • “Golden Ages and Golden Hinds, or, Periodizing Spain and England,” PMLA, March 2012.
  • “Dismantling Heroism: the Exhaustion of War in Don Quijote,” PMLA 124.5(October 2009):1842-46.