Daniela Gutiérrez Flores

Daniela Gutierrez Flores Headshot

Position Title
Assistant Professor of Spanish

she/ella
607 Sproul
Bio

Daniela Gutiérrez Flores specializes in early modern Spanish and colonial Latin American studies, with an emphasis on the relations between texts, food, and the culture of labor. She is interested in tracing the cultural meanings of food through textual and social practices, visual and material culture, focusing on the different forms of embodied and intellectual labor implicated in food culture. Her current book project, Kitchen Selves: Cooks and the Literary Culture of the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic (1520-1750), investigates the spiritual, political, social, and cultural meanings of cooking at a crucial time in culinary history, namely at the dawn of modern cooking. Through the examination of diaries, novels, poetry, cookbooks, art, and historical records, Kitchen Selves argues that food-making practices offered an avenue for subjects in subaltern classes to challenge social constraints, engage with lettered culture, attain political agency, and shape new social identities and communities. Ultimately, her project seeks to demonstrate that cooks disputed the epistemological, social, racial, and gender frameworks that relegated their labor to an activity that was incapable of producing knowledge and creating cultural capital. 

In addition to her book manuscript, she is currently developing two new research projects. At the intersection of Food and Animal Studies, the first project poses the kitchen as a porous space of interspecies relations through an understanding of the cat as an animal worker. Grounded on Critical Race Studies, the second project considers the role of food in the development of racial imaginaries through an analysis of the associations between Blackness and chocolate in the global early modern world.

Professor Gutiérrez Flores is also interested in using food and sensorial engagement as pedagogical tools in teaching 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
  • Co-PI. "Thinking Food @ the Intersections: Justice and Critical Food Studies". Mellon-Sawyer Seminar. 2024-2025.
  • UC Davis Humanities Institute Faculty Research Fellowship
  • 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 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 159 Brujas y hechicheras
  • SPA 130 Literatura española hasta 1700
  • SPA 274 Critical Approaches to Food in Early Modern Hispanic Studies
  • SPA 224 The Five Senses and the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic
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
  • Critical Race Studies
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
  • “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. [Forthcoming]
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
  • 2023-2024. Job Placement Committee. Spanish and Portuguese Department.