Adam Mahler — Iberian literature, Ladino, literary translation
Site navigation
Site navigation
Recent publications
“Cognitive Economy in Shem Tov ben Yitzhaq Ardutiel’s Proverbios morales,” Hispanic Review, 94.4
“Sailing the Franco-Portuguese Seas in Colonial Macau: A Blue Poetics of Citation in Camilo Pessanha’s Clepsydra,” PMLA, 141.1
“‘Em este som de negrada’: Sounds of Blackness in the Medieval Iberian Lyric,”
La corónica, 52.1
“‘Ai flores, ai flores do verde pino’: The Ecopoetics of the Galician-Portuguese Pine Forest,” Speculum, 99.3
Biography
I am a scholar and translator of Iberian literatures and currently hold a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellowship in Romance Studies at Cornell University. My research is rooted in the multilingual Middle Ages and reads comparatively across Old Spanish, Galician-Portuguese, Hebrew, as well as Ladino and aljamiado. It is also in conversation with Hispano-Arabic literary culture. My scholarship examines the relationship between poetic form and social change, from early instances of racialization in the medieval Iberian lyric to the ecology of the Iberian forest and the financialization of vernacular language work.
In 2017, I received a B.A. in English and Portuguese Literatures from Yale College, and, in 2026, I earned my doctorate in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, with a secondary field in Translation Studies. My dissertation examined the relationship between literary form and subject formation in Iberian literature over the period of vernacular invention that ran from the founding of al-Andalus to the birth of Iberian empire.
My monograph in preparation, Convivial Ecologies of Medieval Iberia, reimagines Américo Castro’s controversial convivencia as convivial ecology, a framework bridging the environmental humanities and premodern critical race studies. Covering the distance between the troubadour cantigas, the epic poem of the Cid, and muwashshaḥāt poems written in Arabic, Hebrew, and Ibero-Romance, it approaches the sublime landscapes and arresting soundscapes of medieval Iberia as a sonic index of social history.
My annotated edition and translation of Shem Tov Ardutiel’s Moral Proverbs and Other Old Spanish Poems Written by Jews is under contract with Harvard University Press’s Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. My first book of translations, the Macau-based poet Camilo Pessanha’s Clepsydra and Other Poems, was published in 2022 with Tagus Press at the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth.
In 2025, I was elected Corresponding Member of the Institute of Medieval Studies at NOVA University Lisbon. My research and translations have been supported by grants from the US–Portugal Fulbright Commission, Spain’s Ministry of Sport and Culture, and PEN America. My scholarship has appeared in PMLA, Speculum, and Hispanic Review, among other journals.
I have an abiding interest in Judeo-Spanish (also called Ladino, Judezmo, Djidió and Spanyolit) and the many-layered cultural inheritance of Sephardic Jews. At Harvard and UC–Berkeley, I designed and taught courses on Ladino language and literature, traversing four script systems and many centuries of literary history. I am in the process of adapting the materials I designed for both courses into a textbook. I welcome contact with scholars and educators interested in promoting and preserving Ladino in its many forms.
pronouns: he/they
email: am3654 AT cornell DOT edu