María José Vega

Researcher

Censorship and Dissent Books, Readers, Printers

Biography

María José Vega holds a PhD in Literary Theory and Modern History and has been Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona since 2006.  She completed her pre-doctoral training at the universities of Turin and Pisa. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford (1990-91), at the Warburg Institute, London, as a Frances Yates International Fellow (1992), at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel (1993), and at the National Library of St Mark’s (1999-2000). Her principal lines of research are the poetics of the Renaissance, the impact of confessionalization on reading and writing practices, censorship theory and the conceptualization of dissent in the long sixteenth century. She received the ICREA Acadèmia award in 2009, 2013 and 2019, the Mercator-Professur award in 2011, and the Alexander von Humboldt Research award (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation) in 2012. She has been the principal investigator of competitive projects since 2001, founded and directed the Seminario de Poética del Renacimiento, and coordinates the inter-university group Poética y política en la primera edad moderna. She has been a visiting professor at universities and research centres in France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Germany, and has carried out research projects at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona and the University of Münster. She has headed the Humanities Commission at AQU Catalunya, and currently chairs the Philology, Literature and Arts panel of the State Research Agency.