Luna Nájera earned a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies at Cornell University, with specializations in Early Modern Spanish and Colonial Latin American literature, history, and culture. She is interested in early modern theories of war, state violence, gender, and surveillance. She has published articles on these subjects in Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Hispanic Review, The Sixteenth Century Journal, and Bulletin of Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies. In her current project, “Affective Economies in Colonial Spanish American Law,” Nájera investigates the association of emotions with the juridical category of “meritorious” subjects in 16th and 17th century Spanish law.
As one possible horizon for our conversation, Hussein Fancy’s rereading of the notion of convivencia dislodges it from the binary academic discourse into which it has become locked since the bitter debates between Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz over Spain’s identity in relation to its medieval Iberian past.
