Role: Professor of Spanish; Core Faculty in Islamic Civilization Studies; Affiliated Faculty in Religion, Emory University

  Contact: mcarrio@emory.edu

 Scholarship:
Hispanic marriage, theatre, and law | Early modern Hispanic cultures | Cuban and Puerto Rican literature and cultures | Architecture and the body | Law, literature, and religion

Professor Carrión received her BA from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, and her PhD from Yale University in 1990. She is Professor of Spanish and is also affiliated with the Departments of Women's Studies and Religion at Emory University (1995-2009); she currently holds a Visiting Professorship in the Graduate Program of Translation at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras (2009-2011). She has taught courses and published numerous articles on the Spanish Renaissance and Baroque, Cuban and Puerto Rican literature and culture, gender studies, religious studies, architecture and literature, and law and literature. Her first book, Arquitectura y cuerpo en la figura autorial de Teresa de Jesús(Barcelona: Anthropos, 1994), examined the correspondence between architecture, the gendered body, and the production of an authorial figure staged by mystic writer and Carmelite founder Teresa de Jesús.

Her second area of research is best exemplified by her second book, Subject Stages:Marriage, Theatre, and the Law in Early Modern Spain (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2010), in which she analyzes the two key players in the marriage plot from early modern Spain, those of man and woman, as subjects of vulnerability, resistance, and resilience. In early modern Spain, the strict definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman of Catholic faith for the sole purpose of procreation became a key strategy in the production of Spain's version of empire, the Universal Catholic Monarchy. Subject Stages argues that popular and courtly Spanish theatre questioned this marital prescription by staging subjects that were strictly regulated or prohibited by the crown. As a result, theatre audiences in Spain saw different representations of marriage: women arguing in court against marital violence, queens and noblewomen delaying or refusing imposed marriages, and queer subjects articulating radical critiques of sex and gender policing.Subject Stages argues that the discourses and practices of marital legislation, litigation, and theatrics informed each other during this period in ways that still have a critical bearing on contemporary events in Spain, such as the legalization of divorce in 1978 and of same-sex marriage in 2005.