Christopher Maurer

Professor of Spanish

  • Title Professor of Spanish
  • Office 718 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 301B
  • Phone 617-353-6233, 617-353-6225
  • Education BA, Columbia University
    MA, University of Pennsylvania
    PhD, University of Pennsylvania
Professor Maurer writes about Spanish poetry from Garcilaso to the so-called Generación del 27. Three of his major research interests are biography, textual criticism, and poetry’s relations with music and painting. His first book was a biography and edition of the bilingual (Italian/Spanish) sixteenth-century poet Francisco de Figueroa and his most recent, with Andrew A. Anderson, Federico Garcia Lorca en Nueva York y La Habana: Cartas y recuerdos (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2013).

Prof. Maurer is the editor of García Lorca’s Collected Poems and Selected Verse; his lectures (Conferencias); his early prose (Prosa inédita de juventud), and editor, with Andrew A. Anderson, of García Lorca’s complete letters (Epistolario completo). His translated books include Lorca’s Deep Song and Other Prose, In Search of Duende, and A Season in Granada, a collection of letters between Lorca and Salvador Dalí (Sebastian’s Arrows published by Swan Isle Press),  The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracián, an anthology of Gracián’s other writings (A Pocket Mirror for Heroes) and works by Juan Ramón Jiménez (The Complete Perfectionist: A Poetics of Work) (Spanish translation fall 2016, Madrid, Fundamentos).  His biography of American painter and writer Walter Inglis Anderson won the 2003 Eudora Welty Award and the Non Fiction Prize of the Mississippi Academy of Arts and Letters.

He recently edited “Streets and Dreams,” a digital humanities project mapping Lorca’s movements in New York (1929-30) and co-curated, with Andres Soria Olmedo, the exhibition “Back Tomorrow: Lorca, Poet in New York” at the New York Public Library. Maurer is a Miembro Correspondiente of the Real Academia Española.

Prof. Maurer offers introductory and advanced courses on translation and on early-modern and modern Spanish literature. His recent seminars have studied the 20th-century reception of Baroque authors in Spain and Latin America, the uses of archives, the historical Avant-Garde,  and the intersection of lives and texts (biography and textual criticism.)

View all profiles