Esperanza Alfonso

Esperanza Alfonso holds a PhD in Hebrew Philology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (1998). She has taught at Cornell University (2000, 2004-2005), the University of Wisconsin—Madison (2002-2005), Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2006-2008) and the University of Pennsylvania (Spring 2013). In 1998-1999, she received the Martin Gruss Fellowship and in 2013 the Selma Ruben Fellowship at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in Philadelphia, and she has also held a Skirball Visiting Fellowship at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (Spring 2008).

In 2008 she joined the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid as a tenured research fellow.

Between 2008 and 2012 she was the Principal Investigator of an ERC Starting Grant (ERC-2007-StG 209044-INTELEG), “The Intellectual and Material Legacies of Late Medieval Sephardic Judaism: An Interdisciplinary Approach;” currently she is a member of the project “Legado de Sefarad. La producción material e intelectual del judaísmo sefardí bajomedieval,” (FFI2012-38451) directed by Javier del Barco. Her research centers on Jewish cultural history in the Middle Ages, with a focus on the Iberian Peninsula.

Her main publications include:

• Islamic Culture Through Jewish Eyes: Al-Andalus from the 10th to the 12th-Century. London: Routledge, 2007.

• (ed.), “Patronage in Islamic Societies.” Special issue, Al-Qantara 29-2 (2008).

• (ed.), with Carmen Caballero-Navas. Late Medieval Jewish Identities: Iberia and Beyond. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010.

• (ed.), with Ross Brann. “Al-Andalus and its Legacies.” Special issue, Comparative Literature Studies 45-2 (2008).

• (ed.), with Javier del Barco, M. Teresa Ortega Monasterio and Arturo Prats. Bibles of Sepharad/Biblias de Sepharad. Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional de España, 2012.