I teach on the Hispanic Studies, Comparative Literature and Culture, and Liberal Arts programmes in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. My teaching and research are rooted in comparative and transnational approaches. I am a specialist in medieval and early modern literatures of Iberia and the wider Hispanic world; my work looks at cross-cultural literary exchange and cultural translation, questions of gender, alterity, and the human condition, and the uses and representations of the past in contemporary culture.
I am author of Celestina and the Human Condition in Early Modern Spain and Italy (Tamesis, 2017), which examines the reception of the late medieval Spanish masterpiece Celestina and philosophical debates about the human condition in sixteenth-century Spain and Italy, and co-editor of Al-Andalus in Motion: Travelling Concepts and Cross-Cultural Contexts (Boydell & Brewer, 2021), a collection of essays which explore how al-Andalus (the Muslim-ruled lands of the Iberian Peninsula between the eighth and fifteenth centuries) has been transformed into a ‘travelling concept’, transcending its geographic and historical origins. You can find out more about these and other publications on my PURE research profile.
My current project traces the medieval and early modern European reception of Kalila wa-Dimna, a collection of Arabic fables that originated in India and has been translated into more than forty languages, demonstrating the fluidity and transnationality of earlier literatures. As part of this research, I have worked with artists, curators, arts organisations, and school children on an Arts Council England-funded project, Ancient Tales for Troubled Times, which resulted in an exhibition at the P21 Gallery in London and accompanying programme of public events during May-June 2022.
Before joining Royal Holloway, I was a postdoctoral researcher on Language Acts and Worldmaking, one of the Arts and Humanities Research Council's flagship Open World Research Initiative projects, and Lecturer in Medieval Spanish Literature at Queen Mary University of London.
Twitter: @rach_scottie
