Karen StolleyProfessor of Spanish

Professor Karen Stolley, who came to Emory in 1992, received her Ph.D. in Spanish from Yale University and her B.A. in Spanish and French, summa cum laude, from Middlebury College. She spent a year as a Rotary Fellow in Tucumán, Argentina and received a Fulbright Fellowship to study at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Prior to coming to Emory, Professor Stolley taught at Vassar College; she has also taught at the Middlebury Summer Spanish Language School and as visiting faculty at the University of Pennsylvania.

At Emory Professor Stolley teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in colonial and eighteenth-century Spanish American and transatlantic literary and cultural studies; she is also a member of the graduate faculty in History. Recent graduate seminars include: Nature in the New World; Mestizajes; The Transatlantic Epistolary (co-taught with Professor Hazel Gold); Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Problems of the Colonial Baroque; (Re) Considering the Hispanic Eighteenth Century; and Themes and Approaches in Latin American History (co-taught with Professors Yanna Yannakakis and Javier Villa-Flores). At the undergraduate level Professor Stolley teaches a Freshman Seminar on Citizenship and Belonging in the Hispanic World, as well as intermediate and advanced-level courses on Latin American literary and cultural production and on Narrative Medicine in the Spanish-speaking world.

Professor Stolley is the author of DOMESTICATING EMPIRE: Enlightenment in Spanish America (Vanderbilt U Press, December 2013), where she argues for the recovery of the eighteenth century in Spanish American literary historiography and for the importance of Spanish American writing for eighteenth-century studies. She is also the author of El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes: un itinerario crítico (Ediciones del Norte) and contributed a chapter on "Narrative Forms, Scholarship and Learning in the XVIII Century" for The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature (Eds. Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo Walker). She has published articles in journals including Dieciocho, Guaraguao, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Latin American Literary Review, and Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana. Her most recent book, co-edited with Catherine Jaffe, is The Black Legend of Spain and its Atlantic Empire in the Eighteenth Century | Liverpool University Press (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment/Liverpool University Press, 2024).

Professor Stolley serves on the editorial board of Dieciocho and OSE (Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment). She is a former member of the Board of Trustees of Middlebury College and the Board of Advisors of the Middlebury Institute for International Studies in Monterey, CA.

Please note: Dr. Stolley actively mentors graduate students but will no longer be accepting new advisees in the Hispanic Studies or History PhD Program. 

Recent publications include essays in Mexican Literature as World Literature (ed. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Bloomsbury 2021), which received Honorary Mention in the 2023 MLA Awards Prize for an Edited Collection; The Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment (eds. Elizabeth Franklin Lewis, Mónica Bolufer Peruga, Catherine M. Jaffe; Routledge 2021); and Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective, eds. Margaret Boyle and Sarah A. Owens (U Toronto, 2021).

Eighteenth-century Spanish America

Global, transatlantic, and hemispheric Enlightenment studies

Colonial Latin American studies