E. Michael Gerli

E. Michael Gerli is Commonwealth Professor Emeritus of Spanish and Medieval Studies at the University of Virginia. His research interests include the social, intellectual and cultural history of the Western Mediterranean, including North Africa, from the Middle Ages through early modernity. His early interest in medieval Spanish literature was shaped by formative readings of canonical texts, including La Celestina, which he first encountered at the age of 20 and would later become a focal point of his scholarly career. Gerli has also held teaching positions at Georgetown University, where he served as Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese from 1982 to 1989 and 1997 to 2000 and was Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor.

Professor Gerli is the author of some 200 publications on medieval and renaissance Romance literary and linguistic themes. His Celestina and the Ends of Desire (University of Toronto Press, 2011) was awarded the Modern Language Association of America’s twenty-second annual Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures. Professor Gerli’s Refiguring Authority: Reading, Writing, and Rewriting in Cervantes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995) was chosen as an “Outstanding Academic Book” by the American Association of College and University Libraries in 1996.

The latest of his sixteen books, Cervantes: Displacements, Inflections and Transcendence was published in 2019. Gerli is also a recipient of the Hispanic Review’s Edwin B. Williams Prize (1981) and the Modern Language Association’s Division of Medieval Spanish Language and Literature’s John K. Walsh Prize (1997). In 2009 he was named Distinguished Alumnus by the University of California, Los Angeles, and in 2015 he received Sigma Delta Pi’s (the Spanish National Honorary Society’s) Order of Don Quijote, its highest award.