Seth R. Kimmel

BIO:

Seth Kimmel studies the literatures and cultures of medieval and early modern Iberia. He earned his B.A. in Comparative Literature and Religion from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined Stanford’s Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities in 2010.

His current book project, Erasing the Difference: The End of Islamic Iberia and the Transformation of the Disciplines, argues that early modern debates about the narratives, rituals, and languages shared among Old Christians and religious minorities in the Hispanic World reshaped the fields of theology and philology. The book, which examines inquisitorial guidebooks, scholastic commentaries, philological treatises, humanist correspondence, and both forged and canonical holy text, complicates conventional genealogies of tolerance, textual historicism, and religious reform.

Seth works with texts written in Spanish, French, Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew, and his other research interests include theories of secularism and religion, manuscript and early print culture, the history of cartography, and colonial narrative.