Lisa Voigt

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A specialist in colonial Latin American literature and culture, Lisa Voigt taught at the University of Chicago and The Ohio State University prior to her arrival at Yale in 2023. She is the author of Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns (University of Texas Press, 2016) and Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press, 2009), which won the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in the field of Latin American and Spanish literature and cultures. Her research has been supported by the NEH, ACLS, Fulbright, and the Mellon and Gulbenkian Foundations. She is currently writing a book with art historian Stephanie Leitch (Florida State University) on recycled and copied illustrations of the extra-European world in early modern travel accounts. Emerging from her involvement in Public Rituals in the Portuguese Empire (2018-2022) are several publications as well as a new collaborative project with musicians and scholars in Brazil and Portugal on multilingual early modern performance, which recently received a LASA-Ford Special Project grant (2026). She is currently Special Issues Editor of Colonial Latin American Review.

Selected publications:

Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns

Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds 

“A representação de reis estrangeiros nas festas reais portuguesas, s. XV-XVII.” Revista de História da Sociedade e da Cultura 25.2 (2025), special issue: Rituáis Públicos e Alteridade no Império Português, co-edited with Ângela Barreto Xavier. 103-124. 

“Formas de historiar: The areíto between the repertoire and the archive of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés.” Atlantic Studies: Global Currents. Special issue: Early Atlantic Soundings, edited by Sarah Finley and Elisabeth Le Guin. 1-13. 

“All the World on Stage: Performance and Global Knowledge in Early Modern Portuguese Festivals.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 55.1 (2021): 41-64.

“The Archive and the Festival.” Journal of Festive Studies 1 (May 2019): 27-35.

“The Traveling Illustrations of Sixteenth-Century Travel Narratives.” With Elio Brancaforte. PMLA 129.3 (May 2014): 365-98.