Javier Patiño Loira

Javier Patiño Loira joined the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA in 2017, after receiving his PhD from Princeton University. He has published articles and book chapters on a variety of topics connected with early modern Spain and Italy. These include literature and science, the formation of libraries, education, translation, and the development of the notion of interiority.

Javier is working toward his second book, Ecologies of Decay: Spontaneous Generation and Nature’s Economy, a project that he started during the 2024-25 academic year as a fellow at I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy. Ecologies of Decay argues that the study of spontaneous generation (the belief that insects, toads, fungi, and a variety of creatures emerged from decaying matter) crucially informed seventeenth-century views of nature’s “economy,” its program to remain always similar to itself yet never the same. The book explores two crucial developments resulting from the belief that death and decay were just a new beginning for life, and that individuals of one species could be born from the remnants of another species. The first was a view of nature as a dynamic, sustainable, and self-regulating web of interconnected beings, in which nature remained whole by repurposing rot. The second was the rise of complex forms of ecological thought: Ecologies of Decay contends that spontaneous generation shaped a world of horizontal links, integrated by beings born not from what is similar to them but from what lies nearby, in which contiguity replaces lineage and hierarchies among different beings become increasingly less relevant. By explaining spontaneous generation through the lens of material processes such as fermentation and putrefaction, natural philosophers advanced a materialistic and ecologically conscious vindication of the study of lesser forms of life, including insects, fungi, and parasites believed to be generated inside the body. Spanning from the early seventeenth to the early eighteenth century, Ecologies of Decay demonstrates that clichés about “Baroque” culture, including the lure of death embodied by flesh-eating worms and ruins—in vanitas paintings, poetic meditations on the fragility of earthly existence, and devotional “arts of dying”—made sense within a materialistic ecology of decay and regeneration that captivated scholars and creators with its protean and riotous creativity, in which human and non-human history related to one another in terms of matter and its transformation.

Javier’s first book, The Age of Subtlety: Nature and Rhetorical Conceits in Early Modern Europe (University of Delaware Press, 2024) is the culmination of a project that was awarded several fellowships, including a 2020–21 ACLS Fellowship. At the crossroads between literature and the history of science, The Age of Subtlety adopts a fresh and transdisciplinary approach to seventeenth-century rhetorical conceits, devices that connect diverse facets of reality in a playful and irreverent way through figurative language. Reacting to a tradition that has studied conceits within the narrow sphere of rhetorical and poetic debates, the book contends that the extraordinary popularity and controversy that surrounded conceits only make sense when they are considered within the early modern culture of ingenuity. Ingenuity was a form of creative, problem-solving use of the imagination that was at once responsible for the conceits of orators and poets, the machines of the engineer, the juggler’s sleight of hand, the wiles of the statesman, and the discovery of truths about nature. While modern, post-Kantian views confine the imagination to the poet and the artist, the book argues that, for seventeenth-century individuals, the invention of conceits existed in continuity with practices that today we associate with science and technology. By examining a set of Italian and Spanish theories of the conceit composed between 1619 and 1654 in parallel with contemporary works of natural philosophy and mathematical disciplines, The Age of Subtlety contests the received and well-established belief that conceits departed from the imitation of nature in the pursuit of creative freedom. Instead, it contends that theorists often understood conceits as a response to a new sensibility towards the study of nature articulated around the notion of “subtlety.”

Since September 2014, Javier has been part of the Diversifying the Classics project, directed by Prof. Barbara Fuchs at UCLA. As a member of the project’s Comedia in Translation and Performance working group, he has co-translated nine seventeenth-century Hispanic plays into English.