Kathryn Phipps

Kathryn Phipps is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Bryn Mawr College and investigates the cultural history Early Modern Spain through the eyes of its pariahs. She completed her Ph.D. and M.A at the University of Pennsylvania and her B.A. at Princeton University. An early modernist with a penchant for heretics, her broader research interests include the Reformation in Spain, confessional literature and narrative, paleography, and the Spanish Inquisition.

Her book manuscript is currently titled, “Lutheran Women and the Spanish Inquisition: Theological Belonging from Guadalajara to Valladolid, 1532-1564.” The work establishes a critical contrast between the now-canonical Spanish mystics and the markedly bookish women tried in mid-century Castile as “Lutheran dogmatizers” by showcasing the theological sagacity of tradeswomen, servants, nuns, and noblewomen who faced inquisitorial suspicion for their illicit textual practices: reading, writing, even preaching prohibited doctrine at the height of the Reformation in Spain.

Her recent article, “Hope from the Ashes: Juan Pérez de Pineda’s Mystical Body beyond Neoplatonic Consolation,” published in the Journal of Early Modern Christianity (De Gruyter) is representative of her broader interest in exploring heterodoxy and heterogeneity the Early Modern Hispanic World, considering Pérez’s peculiar positionality in the center of myriad theological crossroads. Her current article projects explore oddities across a wide range early modern textual and visual production—from apocryphal versions of Don Quixote to bizarre 18th-century Latin poetry preserved by the Mexican Inquisition.

In the classroom, she lowers the stakes of failure while raising expectations for excellence in all stages of the learning journey, encouraging risk-taking, curiosity, and critical thinking in the language classroom and in advanced studies of Early Modernity. At Bryn Mawr she teaches writing-focused courses like “Ficciones de la confesión en la literature española,” which takes confession as a point of departure to blur the lines that often divide early modernity: literature and history, fact and fiction, truth and deception. Her course “Escritoras, brujas, y otras herejes” introduces students to the Early Modern Hispanic World through its misfits: looking at the stories of women—broadly defined—who pushed the boundaries of what it meant to belong to imperial societies.

On the rare chance she is not tucked away somewhere in a book, she can most likely be found in a ballet studio or making friends with a stranger over a cup of locally roasted coffee.