Maxim Rigaux specializes in the literature of the Spanish Golden Age, with a special interest in the interaction between Latin and the vernacular languages in this period. He earned his Ph.D. at Ghent University, Belgium, where he focused on a series of epic poems dealing with the battle of Lepanto composed in Latin, Spanish and Catalan. The title of his dissertation is: Fictions of Lepanto. Visuality and Epic Poetry in Renaissance Iberia (1571-1587).
Since October 2018, he is affiliated to the University of Chicago, working as a Visiting Scholar on a new research project Before the Royal Tomb. Juan Latino’s Lyric Poetry. For this project, he received fellowships from Fulbright and BAEF (Belgian American Educational Foundation). This project examines Juan Latino's largely neglected 1576 volume of Latin poetry in relation to devotional art of the period. A commemorative work of the transfer of royal corpses from Granada to El Escorial, this book offers a unique opportunity to study how Latino (1517-94), a former black slave and marginal figure of Spain's Renaissance, negotiated the relationship between city and court, the textual and the visual, and the secular and the profane within a ceremonial context.
Maxim is also a co-founder of the research group RELICS (Researchers of European Literary Identity, Cosmopolitanism and the Schools) and an editor of the open access journal JOLCEL (Journal of Latin Cosmopolitanism and European Schools). The first issue of this journal will be published in January, 2019.