Daniela Gutiérrez Flores received a B.A. in Spanish Language and Literature from Tecnológico de Monterrey in 2012. She joined the PhD program in Fall 2016, after having worked as an editor, translator and lexicographer. She is interested in the intersection between literature, food and culinary cultures, and, more specifically, in the emergence of cultural discourses about food in Early Modern Spain and Colonial Latin America. Her dissertation considers cooks, both literary characters and historical agents, as key figures to understand the literary practices and cultural transformations of the Early Modern Hispanic world.
Research interests: Early Modern Spanish literature; Colonial Latin American literature; Food studies; Gender and Sexuality; Historical cooking.
Dissertation: The Poetics of the Kitchen: Cooks and the Literary Culture in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic
Recent Courses in RLL
- SPAN 10100 Beginning Elementary Spanish I (Autumn 2019)
- SPAN 22620 Food, Culture and Writing in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic (Autumn 2020)
Recent Courses in RLL
SPAN 22620 Food, Culture and Writing in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic
This class will engage critically with Iberian and Latin American food studies by focusing on iconic everyday food commodities whose history is deeply rooted in colonization, slavery, imperial expansion and evangelization. Students will examine the presence of foods—such as maize, chocolate, sugar, potato and chili— in early modern literature, travel narratives, natural histories and historical documents in order to reflect upon issues like cultural interaction, identity formation and difference in the context of the Spanish Empire. We will read texts such as those by Fernández de Oviedo, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Guamán Poma, as well as unpublished recipes and cookbooks. We will also engage with hands-on research and reconstruction of early modern recipes to gain insight into historical techniques and materials.
Early modern sources will be put in dialogue with contemporary issues like gastronomic prestige, food justice and sustainability. In doing so, students will be provided with critical tools to analyze the political, economic, gender and racial implications of contemporary discourses of food.
Taught in Spanish.