Biography
Lara Vilà is a lecturer in the Department of Philology and Communication at the University of Girona (UdG) and has been a member of the Seminario de Poética Europea del Renacimiento since its foundation. After graduating with a degree in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, she obtained her PhD in Spanish Philology with a thesis on the study of peninsular epic poetry in the fifteenth century. She has been a lecturer at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Universitat Oberta de Cataluña, as well as a Ramón y Cajal researcher. Her main lines of research, in addition to Renaissance epic, have dealt with the Spanish colonial advance in Asia during the modern period and, more recently, with the culture of war in Habsburg Spain. Her most recent research has explored the ideological principles determining the representation of the soldier and war in literature written in the Habsburg environment or in the territories under their rule or influence. Publications on this subject have focused on the study of the conflicts with the House of Valois and fighting the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean, paying particular attention to differences in the organization of war in the reigns of Charles V and Philip II. She is currently working on the literature dealing with the Schmalkaldic War. Some of the preliminary results have already appeared and she is completing an edition of the poem El victorioso Carlos V by Jerónimo Jiménez de Urrea.