Hilaire Kallendorf, Ph.D.

Hilaire Kallendorf is Professor of Hispanic and Religious Studies and a Cornerstone Faculty Fellow in Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at UCLA and an American Council of Learned Societies / Andrew W. Mellon Junior Faculty Fellow. She was awarded a Howard Foundation Mid-Career Fellowship from Brown University and, in 2006, the $50,000 Hiett Prize in the Humanities, along with other research grants from the Renaissance Society of America, the Bibliographical Society of America, the Ford Foundation, Spain’s Ministry of Culture, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her research and teaching deal with many aspects of religious experience, especially as belief relates to literature and culture. She is the author of four academic monographs, Exorcism and Its Texts: Subjectivity in Early Modern Literature of England and Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2003); Conscience on Stage: The Comedia as Casuistry in Early Modern Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2007); Sins of the Fathers: Moral Economies in Early Modern Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2013); and Ambiguous Antidotes: Virtue as Vaccine for Vice in Early Modern Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2017). She is general editor of A New Companion to Hispanic Mysticism (Leiden: Brill, 2010), which won the 2011 Bainton Book Prize for Reference Works from the Sixteenth Century Society, as well as A Companion to Early Modern Hispanic Theater (Brill, 2014) and A Companion to the Spanish Renaissance (Brill, 2018). She translated Spanish Baroque poet Francisco de Quevedo’s Silvas into English (Lima, Peru: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2011). With her father, a celebrity tennis player, she wrote a memoir, Acing Depression: A Tennis Champion’s Toughest Match (Washington, D.C.: New Chapter Press, 2010). She has published articles in peer-reviewed journals on such topics as self-exorcism, piety and pornography, ghosts, Taíno religious ceremonies, and Christian humanism in the Renaissance. Her collected essays on religion and literature have recently appeared in Spanish translation as La retórica del exorcismo: ensayos sobre religión y literatura (Iberoamericana, 2016).