Faculty Profile for Dr. Catherine M Jaffe

Biography Section

Biography and Education

Catherine M. Jaffe, University Distinguished Professor, is a specialist in modern Spanish and comparative literature, with a focus on 18th-century women writers and the Enlightenment. She is the coordinator of the Spanish Division in the Department of World Languages and Literatures.

Jaffe co-authored María Lorenza de los Ríos, marquesa de Fuerte-Híjar: Vida y obra de una escritora del Siglo de las Luces (2019). She co-edited The Black Legend of Spain and its Atlantic Empire in the Eighteenth Century: Constructing National Identities (2024); Society Women and Enlightened Charity in Spain: The Junta de Damas de Honor y Mérito, 1787-1823 (2022); Eve’s Enlightenment: Women’s Experience in Spain and Spanish America, 1726-1831 (2009); and The Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment (2020). Jaffe has held research awards from the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study (Fellow 2019-20), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Women’s Caucus of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Fulbright Commission, and Spain’s Ministry of Culture. She is a member of the Spanish research projects BIESES, Bibliografía de Escritoras Españolas (2020-2023); MEMSTORIA (Las barricadas del recuerdo. Historia y memoria de la era de las revoluciones en España e Hispanoamérica (1776-1848); and TRAMOS (Gender, Politics, and Emotions in the Long Nineteenth Century. Modern Transitions in Spain from a Global Perspective).
Jaffe served as president and for six years as Executive Secretary/Treasurer of the Ibero-American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She served on the Executive Committee of the 18th-19th-Century Spanish and Iberian Literature Forum of the Modern Languages Association (2018-2022). She was a member of the Executive Board of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2020-2023). Jaffe served on the editorial board of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture and she currently serves on the editorial boards of the monograph series Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment and the journals Dieciocho: Hispanic Enlightenment, Revista de escritoras ibéricas (UNED), and Anales de Literatura Española (Universidad de Alicante).

Jaffe holds a B.A. in Honors English from Georgetown University (Phi Beta Kappa) and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago.

Teaching Interests

Spanish novel, poetry, and culture; Don Quijote; interdisciplinary humanities

Research Interests

18th-21st-century Spanish literature; women writers; the Enlightenment; quixotism; translation; gender and reading