Brais Lamela Gómez
Brais Lamela is a PhD candidate in the Departments of Spanish & Portuguese and Early Modern Studies at Yale University. Drawing from literary studies, social history, and the environmental humanities, he works on the cultural production of the Spanish Empire and is broadly interested in how literature responds to processes of dispossession and displacement.
He is currently completing his dissertation, “Communitarian Aesthetics: Literatures of the Spanish Empire in an Age of Dispossession.” Between 1580 and 1630, the Spanish Monarchy launched a vast program to sell communal resources in rural areas of Peru, Mexico, and Spain, in what has been described as the first great agrarian transformation of the Spanish Empire. This systematic project of privatization had a hitherto unexplored impact on cultural production: writers on both sides of the Atlantic developed innovative approaches to represent rural settings and practices, beyond the tropes of the pastoral and the bucolic, to both register and contest this violent process of environmental change. By drawing from an archive comprising peasant plays, hybrid codices, land surveying manuals, proto-ethnographic poetry about rural communities, and agricultural treatises, Communitarian Aesthetics shows how authors at the time centered the agrarian commons to imagine malleable, collective, and generative futures beyond enclosure.
Beyond his dissertation, Brais Lamela is also interested in translation and multilingualism, new approaches to the colonial archive, law and literature, and questions of environment and political economy. His research has appeared in the Colonial Latin American Review and will be published in the Bulletin of the Comediantes, and has been funded by external grants from the Huntington Library, John Carter Brown Library, Folger Shakespeare Library, the Renaissance Society of America, and Spain’s Ministry of Culture, among others. He has conducted archival research in Spain (Simancas, Seville, Madrid), Peru (Lima, Ayacucho), and Mexico (Mexico City).
In addition to his academic profile, Brais Lamela is also a fiction author in Galician, his native language. His debut novel, Ninguén queda (2022) received two national awards in Spain and has been translated into four languages. The U.S. translation, What Remains (2026) is out with Dorothy Project. His second novel, A lingua estranxeira (2026) will appear in Spanish translation in October 2026 with Literatura Random House.