ABOUT THE PANELISTS

​

Marta Albalá Pelegrín is an Associate Professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona in the Department of English and Modern Languages. She studies the intellectual networks and cultural production of late medieval and early modern Iberia, with a focus on theatrical performances and literary works produced in early sixteenth-century Rome. Her current book project, Theater of Conquest: Performing Iberian Newspieces in Rome (1450-1530), explores how Iberian performances re-elaborated the news of conquest that arrived at Christian diplomatic centers, such as Rome, Naples, and Lisbon. Her articles and book chapters have appeared in Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Routledge, Toronto University Press, and Brepols. Albalá Pelegrín has been a Berenson Fellow at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at UCLA. Her research has been supported by the RSA Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellowship, the Newberry Library, the Fulbright-Hays program, the NEH, McGill University, and the Folger Library. 

 

Barbara Fuchs is Professor of Spanish and English at UCLA. She is the founder and director of the Working Group on the Comedia in Translation and Performance and its Diversifying the Classics initiative, which has been working to promote Hispanic classical theater since 2014. With Jon Rivera of Playwrights’ Arena, she launched Golden Tongues, an adaptation initiative connecting Los Angeles playwrights with comedia to produce brand-new plays. In 2018, she founded LA Escena, Los Angeles’ festival of Hispanic classical theater. 

 

Professor Fuchs has published widely on early modern literature and culture and contemporary performance. She has also translated a wide range of early modern Hispanic classics, including seven comedias with the Working Group, now available on the Diversifying the Classics open-access website or in print from Juan de la Cuesta press. Recent projects include a translation of Lope de Vega’s rediscovered Women and Servants (Juan de la Cuesta 2016); The Golden Age of Spanish Drama, with Gregary Racz (Norton Critical Editions 2018); and 90 Monologues from Classical Spanish Theater, translated and edited with Laura Muñoz and Jennifer Monti (Juan de la Cuesta 2018).

 

Fuchs’s most recent book is Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic (Bloomsbury/Methuen 2021), informed by her experience with the 2020 edition of LA Escena. In 2020-21, she served as the UCLA Clark Professor, directing a program on “Resituating the Comedia” at the UCLA Clark Memorial Library and Center for 17th and 18th-Century Studies.

​

Laura Muñoz received her Ph.D. from UCLA with a specialization in early modern Spanish theater and is currently an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California. As a member of the Diversifying the Classics initiative at UCLA she has collaborated on a series of translations with Juan de la Cuesta, including a co-translation of Guillén de Castro's Los mal casados de Valencia, Unhappily Married in Valencia (2019). She has served as dramaturg for a number of staged readings and productions of Hispanic classical theater in and around Los Angeles including Julie Taiwo Oni's The Woodingle Puppet Show (2020) and Fuenteovejuna (2019) directed by Sylvia Cervantes Blush.