Biography
Gerli earned his Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1972. [4] His early interest in medieval Spanish literature was shaped by formative readings of canonical texts, including La Celestina, which he first encountered at the age of 20 and would later become a focal point of his scholarly career. [5]
Gerli has held teaching positions at Georgetown University, where he served as Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese from 1982 to 1989 and 1997 to 2000 and was Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor. [6]
In 2000, he joined the University of Virginia, where he was appointed Commonwealth Professor of Spanish and Medieval Studies. [7] He has also served as a Visiting Professor at universities such as Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, the University of Pennsylvania, Emory University, Stanford University, and the Universidad Pontificia del Perú. [8]
Gerli has served on the editorial boards of numerous scholarly journals, including La Corónica, Hispanic Review , Anuario de Estudios Cervantinos, Journal of Hispanic Philology, Medievalia, and Convivencia. He was elected to the Modern Language Association’s Delegate Assembly and served twice as chair of the MLA Division of Medieval Hispanic Languages and Literatures.
Research and scholarly works
Gerli's scholarship explores the interplay between literature, language, and cultural identity in the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance. [9] His research is particularly concerned with questions of authorship, literary authority, and the historical conditions of textual production and reception. [10]
He is the general editor of Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia (Routledge, 2003), a comprehensive reference work that was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Book. [11] Among his most influential monographs is Celestina and the Ends of Desire (University of Toronto Press, 2011), which received the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovács Prize for an outstanding book in Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures. [4] In this book, Gerli interprets La Celestina through the lens of psychoanalytic and cultural theory, analyzing the workings of desire, voyeurism, and the body in the text. [12]
His earlier work, Refiguring Authority: Reading, Writing, and Rewriting in Cervantes (1995), [13] was awarded “Outstanding Academic Book” by the American Association of College and University Libraries, and is a widely cited study in Cervantine scholarship. [4]
Gerli has also written on the cultural history of conversos (Jews who converted to Christianity), manuscript traditions, [14] the development of Romance philology, [15] and the emergence of print culture in early modern Spain. [2]
Gerli is internationally known for his research on La Celestina (Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea), a foundational work of Spanish literature. [1] He has proposed a controversial but increasingly discussed hypothesis that the original printing of Celestina may have been carried out by the Lucena sisters, members of a converso family engaged in clandestine Hebrew printing in La Puebla de Montalbán in the late 15th century. [3] His work situates Celestina at the intersection of sexual politics, Jewish identity, and early print culture in Renaissance Spain. [16]
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