David Wacks

David Wacks

Areas of Interests: Medieval Iberian literature and culture, Sephardic Studies, Mediterranean Studies

David Wacks is a Professor of Spanish at the Romance Languages Department of the University of Oregon (USA). He holds a BA in English Literature (Columbia University), a M.A. in Spanish Literature and Language (Boston College), and a Ph.D. inHispanic Literatures and Languages (University of California at Berkeley).

His research focuses on Medieval Iberian literature and culture, Sephardic Studies, and Mediterranean Studies with a special interest in multilingual practices. He is the author of Framing Iberia: Frametales and Maqamat in Medieval Spain (Brill 2007), Double Diaspora in Sephardic Literature 1200-1550: Jewish Cultural Production before and after 1492  Indiana University Press 2015), and Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World (University of Toronto Press: 2019) and co-editor of Wine, Women and Song: Hebrew and Arabic Literature in Medieval Iberia (Juan de la Cuesta 2004), Marginal Voices: Studies in Converso Literature of Medieval and Golden Age Spain (Brill 2010), among others. He also conducts research on Biblical exegesis in 13th century Alfonso X’s General Estoria.

More information: Institutional website; Research gate; Blog

David Wacks’s publications in the IStReS Database:

  • Hamilton, Michelle M., David A. Wacks, and Sarah Portnoy, eds. 2004. Wine, Women and Song: Hebrew and Arabic Literature in Medieval Iberia. Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta. https://experts.umn.edu/en/publications/wine-women-and-song-hebrew-and-arabic-literature-in-medieval-iber.
  • Wacks, David A. 2004. “Between Secular and Sacred: Abraham Ibn Ezra and the Song of Songs.” In Wine, Women and Song: Hebrew and Arabic Literature of Medieval Iberia, edited by Michelle M. Hamilton and Sarah J. Portnoy. Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs. http://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/8233.
  • ———. 2005. “Don Yllan and the Egyptian Sorceror: Vernacular Commonality and Literary Diversity in Medieval Castile.” Sefarad 65 (2): 413–33.
  • ———. 2006a. “Reconquest Colonialism and Andalusī Narrative Practice in the Conde Lucanor.” Diacritics 36 (3–4): 87–103. https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.0.0007.
  • ———. 2006b. “Reading Jaume Roig’s Spill and the Libro de Buen Amor in the Iberian Maqama Tradition.” Routledge, July, 597–616.
  • ———. 2007. Framing Iberia: Maqamat and Frametale Narratives in Medieval Spain. Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World 33. Leiden / Boston: Brill.
  • ———. 2009. “Is Spain’s Hebrew Literature ‘Spanish’?” In Spain’s Multicultural Legacies: Studies in Honor of Samuel G. Armistead, edited by Adrienne Martin and Cristina Martínez-Carazo, 315–31. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs. https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/8782.
  • ———, ed. 2010a. Multilingual Medieval Iberia: Between the Tongue and the Pen (EHumanista Volume 14, Part I). Vol. 14. Santa Barbara: University of California Santa Barbara. http://www.ehumanista.ucsb.edu/volumes/14.
  • ———. 2010b. “Toward a History of Hispano-Hebrew Literature in Its Romance Context.” Edited by Antonio Cortijo Ocaña. EHumanista – Journal of Iberian Studies 14-Part I: Multilingual Medieval Iberia: Between the Tongue and the Pen (Special Section): 178–207.
  • ———. 2012. “Vernacular Anxiety and the Semitic Imaginary: Shem Tov Isaac Ibn Ardutiel de Carrión and His Critics.” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 4 (2): 167–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/17546559.2012.727237.
  • ———. 2013. “Vidal Benvenist’s ‘Efer ve-Dinah’ between Hebrew and Romance.” In A Sea of Languages: Literature and Culture in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean, edited by Suzanne Akbari and Karla Malette, 217–31. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
  • ———. 2014. “Cultural Exchange in the Literatures and Languages of Medieval Iberia.” Sephardic Horizons 4 (1). http://sephardichorizons.org/Volume4/Issue1/culturalexchange.html.
  • ———. 2015a. “‘Crónica de Flores y Blancaflor’: Romance, Conversion, and Internal Orientalism.” Narrative Culture 2 (2): 270–88.
  • ———. 2015b. “Popular Andalusi Literature and Castilian Fiction: Ziyad Ibn ‘Amir al-Kinani, 101 Nights, and Caballero Zifar.” Revista de Poética Medieval, no. 29: 311–35.
  • ———. 2016. “Translation in Diaspora: Sephardic Spanish-Hebrew Translations in the Sixteenth Century.” A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula 2: 351–63. https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxix.30wac.
  • ———. 2017. “An Interstitial History of Medieval Iberian Poetry.” In The Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies, edited by Javier Muñoz-Basols, Laura Lonsdale, and Manuel Delgado, 79–92. London / New York: Routledge.
  • ———. 2019. “Whose Spain Is It, Anyway?” In Who’s Middle Ages? A Reader, edited by Andrew Albin, Mary C. Erler, Thomas O’Donnell, Nicholas L. Paul, and Nina Rowe, 181–90. New York: Fordham University Press. https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:25201/.
  • ———. 2022. “Aljamiado Retellings of the Hebrew Bible.” Postmedieval 13 (3): 419–34. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-022-00251-1.
  • ———. 2023. “Medieval Iberian Romance.” In The New Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, edited by Roberta L. Krueger, 167–79. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108783033.013.
  • Wacks, David A., and Antonio Cortijo Ocaña. 2010. “Multilingual Iberia. Between the Tongue and the Pen. Introduction.” Edited by David A. Wacks. EHumanista – Journal of Iberian Studies 14-Part I: Multilingual Medieval Iberia: Between the Tongue and the Pen (Special Section): i–xii.