Nieves Baranda Leturio has been Professor of Spanish Literature at the UNED since 2011. Between 2018 and 2023, she served as Spain’s Education Attaché in New York. She is recognized as one of the leading international experts on Spanish women writers of the Early Modern period. Her research in this field spans a broad chronology, from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, and reflects extensive knowledge of both authors and their works. She leads the BIESES research project, which has received continuous funding through competitive national grants since 2004 and is considered a benchmark in the field.
Baranda’s research is characterized by a strong documentary foundation and the application of methodologies drawn from textual criticism, literary sociology, reception theory, material culture, and digital humanities. Her topics cover the entire period from the Middle Ages to 1750 and encompass all literary genres. One of her most important studies is the book Cortejo a lo prohibido, which, among other contributions, proposes a historiographical model for the study of women’s writing, along with several specific case studies. Together with M. C. Marín Pina, she edited Letras en la celda (Iberoamericana, 2014) and coordinated a special issue of the journal Criticón (2015) devoted to paratexts.
Other significant articles have explored innovative topics such as female dedicatees, the use of poetry in convents of nuns, women in poetic contests, laywomen’s autobiographies, a novel interpretation of women poets in the literary circles of mid-sixteenth-century Alcalá (2016), female bibliophilia, and the economic dimension of women writers. Her research has achieved international impact, and she has published in both French and English. Particularly noteworthy is the volume she co-edited with Anne J. Cruz, Companion to Early Modern Spanish Women Writers (Routledge, 2017), which consists of twenty-two essays by specialists conceived as a proposal for literary history; the Spanish version was published by UNED.
In addition to her work on women writers, she has researched other areas and is recognized as an expert in chivalric literature, particularly the so-called “short novels.” Other prominent topics in her CV include didactic literature (books intended for children, didacticism, educational treatises) and travel literature.
Overall, she stands out for her leadership, international collaborations, and innovative capacity in bringing attention to previously unknown themes and texts: a brief chronicle on Juan II of Aragon, advisory writings for nobles, El cruzado’s account of a journey to Jerusalem, reading marginalia in Celestina, the comic letters of Gonzalo de Liaño, and the autobiography of Beatriz Ramírez de Mendoza. Beginning in 2015, she incorporated digital humanities methods into her research (she has served on the committee of conferences of the Asociación de Humanidades Digitales Hispánicas), working with databases, metadata tagging, and visualization, while implementing network analysis methodologies.
Her leadership is also evident in the consolidation of the BIESES project and in her collaborations within networks of excellence, including integrated initiatives with Italy and Portugal and participation in European COST actions. She has served on the boards of scholarly associations, for example the U.S.-based GEMELA, where she was vice president. She was director of her department, serves on the scientific committees of journals such as Bulletin of the Comediantes and Janus, founded and directs the Revista de Escritoras Ibéricas (since 2012), and collaborated for five years in the evaluation of research projects with several agencies, particularly the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), first as coordinator and later as manager of the area of Philology and Philosophy (January 1, 2015 – June 30, 2018).