Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco

Professor Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco
Academic background
Alma mater	Universidad de Salamanca
Academic work
Discipline	Medieval Philology
Institutions	Yale University
Notable works	Dead Voice: Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages

Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco is a Spanish-American philologist and medievalist. He currently holds the position of Augustus R. Street Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative Literature at Yale University. He is best known for his work on Chivalry in Castille, and on his approach to Law and literature, most notably, in his scholarly work on the Siete partidas. He is one of the executive directors of the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies. In 2010, he received the John K. Walsh award for his article "La urgente presencia de las Siete Partidas".

Education and career

Rodríguez-Velasco received a Ph.D. in philology from the Universidad de Salamanca (Spain) in 1995. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Universidad de Salamanca, Université de Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle), and the École Normale Supérieure (Lettres et Sciences Humaines) and Columbia University, where he was chair of the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures from 2013 to 2016. He joined Yale University as Augustus R. Street Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in 2020.

Research

Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco's extensive research has made significant contributions to the understanding of medieval law, chivalry, Romance studies, and Iberian society in the Middle Ages. Among his publications are books and articles on Medieval and Early Modern knighthood, history of the book and reading, medieval political theory, law and culture, and Occitan poetry. In Order and Chivalry: Knighthood and Citizenship in Late Medieval Castile Rodríguez-Velasco linked the transformation of chivalry in medieval Castile to the development and rise of a new European urban class. More recently, in Dead Voice: Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages, connects Alfonso X of Castile's use of the vernacular and kin attention to the material production of legal texts in the Siete partidas to a desire to expand and consolidate power over his subjects.

Selected works

• El debate sobre la caballería en el siglo XV: La tratadística caballeresca castellana en su marco europeo. Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1996.
• Guía para el estudio de la literatura Románica Medieval. 2 vols. Salamanca: U de Salamanca, 1998.
• La caballería castellana: textos y contextos. Edited with Carlos Heusch. Montpellier: U de Montpellier III, Paul Valéry, 2000.
• Creación y difusión del Baladro del sabio Merlín. Co-authored with Pedro M. Cátedra. Salamanca: SEMYR, 2001.
• La caballería y el mundo caballeresco. Co-authored with Josef Fleckenstein and Thomas Zotz. Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2006.
• Order and Chivalry. Knighthood and Citizenship in Late Medieval Castile. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2010.
• Plebeyos Márgenes. Ficción, Industria del Derecho y Ciencia de la Literatura (siglos XIII-XIV). Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca - SEMYR, 2011
• Dead Voice: Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.
• Microliteraturas. Madrid: Cátedra, 2022.