Daniela Gutiérrez Flores

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Position Title
Assistant Professor of Spanish

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607 Sproul
Bio

Daniela Gutiérrez Flores specializes in early modern Spanish and colonial Latin American studies, with a focus on the relations between texts, food, and culinary practices. She is interested in tracing the cultural meanings of food through textual and social practices, visual and material culture, and embodied and intellectual labor. Her current project examines how cooking allowed men and women across the early modern Spanish Atlantic to engage with lettered culture, shape new identities, and challenge class, gender, and racial structures, posing kitchen work as a constitutive practice of their subjectivity. Ultimately, her work seeks to understand food through the lens of human agents, highlighting the contributions of ordinary laborers to early modern intellectual and cultural life, and tracing the historical disputes that have given way to contemporary discourses of food consumption, production, and circulation. In addition to her book manuscript, she is currently developing a new research project about the associations of Blackness with chocolate in early modern Spanish literature.

Professor Gutiérrez Flores is also interested in using food and sensorial engagement as pedagogical tools in the teaching of early modern culture and history.  

Education and Degree(s)
  • 2022 - Ph.D. in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies, University of Chicago
  • 2012 - B.A. Hispanic Languages/Literatures. Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, México
Honors and Awards
  • University Instructional Improvement Mini-Grant for “Food, Writing and Culture in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic,” University of California Davis, 2023.
  • Diversity Grant, Renaissance Society of America, 2022.
  • Mellon Foundation – University of Chicago Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2021.
  • Stuart Tave Teaching Fellowship, The College. University of Chicago, 2021.
  • Culinary Historians of New York Association Scholar’s Grant, funded by the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts, 2020.
  • Tinker Foundation Field Research Grant, 2018.
Courses
  • SPA 100 Principles of Hispanic Literature and Criticism
  • SPA 159 Food, Writing and Culture in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic
  • SPA 133N Golden Age Spanish Literature
  • SPA 274 Critical Approaches to Food in Early Modern Hispanic Studies
  • SPA 159 Brujas y hechicheras
  • SPA 130 Literatura española hasta 1700
Research Interests & Expertise
  • Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture
  • Colonial Latin American Literatre and Culture
  • Gender and Sexuality Studies
  • Food Studies
  • History of the Senses
  • Experiential Pedagogies
Publications
  • “In laudem Serenissimi Ferdinandi Hispaniarum regis (1494)”. Catalogue Entry. In Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World. Edited by Noémie Ndiaye and Lika Markey. Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press, 2023.
  • Tales of the Kitchen Underbelly: the Picaresque Discourse of Cooking.” La Corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages/Literatures/Cultures. Vol. 49, Number 3, Summer 2021: 181-210.
  • Dietas transatlánticas: El descubrimiento europeo de los alimentos americanos.” Ciencia Hoy, Vol. 29 núm. 170, mayo - junio 2020
  • [Forthcoming] “The Culinary Devotion of Sor Marianita de San José: Writing and Cooking in 18th c. Mexico.” Beyond Cooking: Global Histories of Food-making and Gender across the Early Modern World. Edited by Melissa Calaresu and Marta Manzanares. Amsterdam University Press.
  • [Forthcoming] “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y el neobarroco cubano.” Parte y contraparte: cultura colonial e imaginación latinoamericana. Edited by Francisco Hernández and Isaac Cantón. Editorial Iberoamericana-Vervuert.
Membership and Service
  • Modern Languages Association. Executive Committee, LLC 16th- and 17th-Century Spanish and Iberian Poetry and Prose Forum
  • Renaissance Society of America
  • Association for the Study of Food and Society