Marta Albalá Pelegrín

Marta Albalá Pelegrín joined the Department of English & Modern Languages at Cal Poly Pomona in 2014 as an Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2020, and to full Professor in 2025. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages from The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, and holds B.A. degrees in Audiovisual Communication (University of Salamanca) and Hispanic Philology (University of Zaragoza), including a year of study at Université Paris VII. She has also served as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at UCLA and as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Medieval Studies (IEM) at NOVA University of Lisbon. Her research and public facing work has been recognized through major competitive fellowships, awards, and grants from institutions including the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti), the Newberry Library, the Renaissance Society of America, the American Philosophical Society, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Spanish Ministry of Culture (Hispanex Program), the Herzog August Bibliothek, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Fulbright-Hays.

Her scholarship examines Iberian and Italian literature and history within broader Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Pacific worlds. She explores how sovereignty and power are shaped discursively and textually, tracing the continuities between literature, performance, and policymaking. Her research draws on performance studies, visual culture, and diplomatic history linking Iberia to Rome, West and West Central Africa, and the Hispanic Pacific.

Her book The Lieutenant Nun: Annotated Translation of the Play, Historical Accounts and Documents about Catalina/Antonio de Erauso (Routledge, 2025), co-authored with Edward Test, offers the first English translation of seventeenth-century literary and archival materials about a Basque person who lived and died under the name Antonio de Erauso (c. 1580–1650), bringing readers closer to an individual who could be considered a trans ancestor. By editing and annotating the play La monja alférez, contemporary accounts, archival documents, and letters, the volume provides scholars working in English with essential new material and a framework for reinterpreting Erauso’s historical and literary afterlives. She is the editor of Wars of Knowledge: Iberian Imperial Hegemony and the Assembling of Libraries (2017), and the co-editor of Crossroads in Early Modern Italy: Encounters between Foreign Travelers and Local Inhabitants (2023) and Comedia Crossings: Spanish Classical Theater across the Arts and Practices (2023). She has published over twenty articles and book chapters.

Her current book project Theater of Conquest: Performing Iberian Expansion in Rome (1450–1530), uncovers how conquest was staged at the papal court as both political spectacle and diplomatic strategy. Moving from performances that reenacted the fall of Granada to curial representations of African sovereignty, the book argues that theater helped shape the legal and ideological foundations of Iberian expansion. It shows how the same diplomatic agents who negotiated treaties and papal bulls also orchestrated performances that mobilized Roman audiences in support of emerging imperial claims. Ultimately, the project demonstrates how performance became a crucial medium through which Iberian powers and the papacy asserted legitimacy and competed for territorial and spiritual sovereignty.

She is also co-editing two books: 

2. Ambivalent Harmonies: Representing Peace in Time of Conflict in the Early Modern Iberian Worlds (with Maria Vittoria Spissu), which examines how peace was theorized, performed, and represented in moments of political and religious conflict across Iberian and imperial contexts.

3.  Mobilities in the Western Mediterranean (12th–21st Centuries) (with Andrew Devereux and Mayte Green Mercado), which brings together interdisciplinary scholarship on long-durée cultural exchange across the medieval, early modern, and contemporary Mediterranean.

She serves as Hispanic Literature Discipline Representative at the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) and is a member of the Board of Directors of SNAP (The Spain-North Africa Project).

Since 2014, she has been a member of UCLA’s Diversifying the Classics project. She leads Radio Comedia, an open-access podcast project that brings early modern Hispanic theater into dialogue with contemporary audiences through full audio plays, interviews with scholars and theater practitioners, and pedagogical materials. Radio Comedia has released three full audio plays in episodic format, accompanied by more than fifteen interviews with actors, directors, dramaturgs, historians, and literary scholars. Her most recent production is a musical adaptation of Calderón de la Barca’s Amar después de la muerte, featuring twelve original songs that explore themes of fratricidal war and political violence.