“I teach the Spanish language so that one day my students can share in this wonderful world of letters and learn to appreciate this literature beyond the common-place lessons contained in the surface of plots.”— Kátia Sherman
Faculty Information
Additional Faculty Information for Kátia Sherman
Education
Ph.D., Spanish Literature and Language
University of Virginia, May 2014
M.A., Spanish Literature and Language
University of Virginia, May 2010
M.M., Historical Performance
Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, May 1994
B.M., Oboe and Historical Performance
Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, May 1992
Memberships
Cervantes Society of America
Renaissance Society of America
Book (Poemario)
De amor y travesía. Madrid: Ediciones Torremozas, 2006.
Book Reviews
Graf, Eric C. De reyes a lobos: seis ensayos sobre Cervantes. Juan de la Cuesta. 2019. 137 pp. (Bulletin of Spanish Studies, forthcoming).
Fitz, Earl E. Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory: Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the last Six Novels. Bucknell University Press, 2019. Pp. 198. ISBN 978-1-68448-112-5. (Hispania, forthcoming).
No Hay con Amor Competencias. Fiesta teatral a las bodas de Carlos II y Mariana de Neoburgo. Edición crítica de María Teresa Cacho Palomar. Teatro del Siglo de Oro. Ediciones Críticas 203. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger. 2015. 229 pp. (Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 90.14, 2018, pp. 9-10).
Pedro Calderón de la Barca. El laberinto del mundo. Edición, estudio y notas de Juan Manuel Escudero Baztán. Autos Sacramentales Completos 92. Edición Crítica. Pamplona: Universidad de Navarra/ Kassel: Edition Reichenberger. 2015. 212 pp. (Bulletin of Spanish Studies 90.14, 2018, pp. 9-10).
Articles
“1595, Día de la Ascensión del Señor: nota sobre el simbolismo religioso en ‘La gitanilla’ de Cervantes.” Co-published with former student Kacey Reeves (forthcoming; Hispanic Journal).
“Beauty, Love, and a Clumsy Lover in Cervantes’s Neoplatonic World: The Case of ‘La gitanilla.’” Hispanic Studies Review 4.1 (2019): 152-164.
“Skepticism and the Humanist Tradition: Cervantes’s ‘La gitanilla’ and Montaigne’s ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond.’” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 96.1, 2019, pp. 17-33.
“Canine Epistemology and the Unfettered Imagination: The Maker’s Knowledge Argument in Cervantes’s ‘El coloquio de los perros.’” Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 96.1, 2019, pp. 1-25.
“Ungodly Miracle or Holy Rape: Irony and the Rule of Faith in Cervantes’ ‘La fuerza de la sangre.’” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 35.2 (2015): 215-249.
“Skepticism, Eutrapelia, and the Erring Exemplar in Cervantes’ Novelas Ejemplares: Cues and Questions in the ‘Prólogo al lector.’” eHumanista 29.1 (2015): 623-638.
“Mediaciones en constancia: neoestoicismo y escepticismo en El príncipe constante de Calderón.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 93.2 (2015): 189-210.
Biography
I came to the United States from my native Brazil as a college freshman, knowing no English at all. I started taking Spanish classes right away, as those seemed at the time to be the only classes I could pass and earn credit for. My first academic incarnation was as a musician, a path I pursued until I could no longer leave Spanish on the back burner. As a musician, I treasured the long hours of meditative work in the solitude of a practice room, and the razor-sharp focus one develops when training body and mind to work together in unison. The study of literature, as I would find later, is much akin to the study of music. One trades musical notes for words, realigns the paradigm pertaining to signified and signifier, and one is all set to go. The love I have for early-modern European music has reinvented itself as a voracious appetite for early-modern Iberian literature and a total and unabashed cognitive and chemical dependence on the literature of Cervantes. Why Cervantes and why Spanish? Because the sociopolitical and religious history of the Iberian Peninsula bestowed upon its writers the gift of a very problematic past (and present, for that matter), the complexities of which writers like Cervantes (but none quite like him) brilliantly questioned and exposed in their works. Moreover, Cervantes infuses in his sociopolitical and religious commentary a profound interest in literary and philosophical theory, which causes his works to be hermeneutical whirlwinds.
I teach the Spanish language so that one day my students can share in this wonderful world of letters and learn to appreciate this literature beyond the common-place lessons contained in the surface of plots. I teach Cervantes because through his irony and his skepticism, he invites his readers (that is, the careful ones, as he explains) to be jolted, manipulated, and challenged in order to arrive at an (stable or unstable) interpretation. That hard work that carries one to a deeper level of understanding is perhaps the essential goal of reading, of discovering, and of living a worthy intellectual life.