Adam Mahler — Iberian literature, Ladino, literary translation
Site navigation
Site navigation
Recent publications
“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 literary translator of Iberian literatures, working across the medieval to modern periods and the diverse geographies of the Iberian world. My scholarship examines the relationship between poetic form and social change.
In 2017, I received a B.A. in English and Portuguese Literatures from Yale College, and, in 2026, I completed a doctorate in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University and joined Cornell University’s Department of Romance Studies as a Klarman Fellow.
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. My annotated translation and edition of Shem Tov Ardutiel’s Moral Proverbs and Other Old Spanish Poems Written by Jews is forthcoming with Harvard University Press’s Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library.
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 articles have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Speculum, La corónica, and Hispanic Review, among others. In 2025, I was elected Corresponding Member of the Institute of Medieval Studies at NOVA University Lisbon.
I have an abiding interest in Judeo-Spanish, aka Ladino, and the many-layered cultural inheritance of Sephardic Jews. At Harvard and UC–Berkeley, I designed and taught the first-ever courses on Ladino language and literature. 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.
Adam Mahler — Iberian literature, Ladino, literary translation
Biography
email: am3654 AT cornell DOT edu