Emily Colbert Cairns, Ph.D.
Emily Colbert Cairns, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Chair | Modern Languages
Associate Professor | Cultural, Environmental, and Global Studies
Dr. Emily Colbert Cairns specializes in gender, converso and crypto-Jewish identity in the early modern period in the Spanish-speaking world, and has published with eHumanista, Chasqui, Cervantes Journal and Hispanófila. Her dissertation, “The Other Sephardic Diaspora: Feminine Representations of Sephardic Identity in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” deals with the role that women had in preserving and representing Sephardic traditions in a transatlantic context. She is the co-editor of Confined Women: The Walls of Female Space in Early Modern Spain (Hispanic Issues Online, 2020) and the author of Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora: Queen of the Conversas (Palgrave 2017).
During her graduate studies at the University of California Irvine, she founded and ran a language exchange program that brought together university students learning Spanish with the local Spanish-speaking community.
Featured Spring 2025
Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic
Edited by Emily Colbert Cairns and Nieves Romero-Díaz
Summary: Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic is the first volume to emphasize women’s personal experiences and their life trajectories as mothers within the Peninsula and across the Atlantic. Although an official discourse that defined the conditions of motherhood emerged in the eighteenth century, before this period there were many different articulations of motherhood through which women negotiated hierarchical relationships, power struggles and alliances. While the individual experiences were unique and depended upon the positionality of race and class, the complexities of being a mother were universal. The wide variety of written and visual documents included in this volume highlight women’s voices in the first person along with more subtle references to motherhood as well as silences. This collection broadens our understanding of the complexities of motherhood, addressing the pressures of becoming a mother, miscarriage, the acts of giving birth and lactation and the ordeals of raising children.
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Published by University of Amsterdam Press, 2024.
McKillop Library Main Collection: HQ759 .E27 2024