CARME FONT PAZ holds a PhD in English Literature from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), where she teaches as a Lecturer (Professora Associada) in the English Department. She is also Research Associate at the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. In 2012-2013 Font was awarded postdoctoral research grants both at UCLA and Harvard University. She serves on the editorial boards of the journal Prose Studies and the New Historia project at The New School, NY.
Integrating gender studies, intellectual history, value theory and social history, her research examines the marginalization of women's writing in the early modern period (1550-1750). She studies the ingrained cultural and social dynamics of debasing women's work that led to a non-assimilation of its value, a process she defines as "textual misogyny". Her work is bringing about transformative and synergic action across disciplines that is changing the way we count knowledge-ordering systems and women as equal intellectual partners. Her aim is for the full integration of women in the systems of knowledge production and transmission. Two major academic publications directly related to Font's research are: A book, Women's Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Routledge, 2017) and an edited volume, with Nina Geerdink, Economic Imperatives for Women's Writing in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2018). In 2022 Carme has edited the special issue "Early Modern Textual Misogynies" for the journal Women's Writing and she is the book series editor of Early Modern Women Writers in Europe (Brepols), and for her cutting-edge Humanities research she has been honored with an ICREA Academia Award.
She is also the author of Cómo escribir sobre una lectura, Cómo crear emoción en la literatura, Cómo diseñar el conflicto narrativo, published by Alba Editorial and El don de la profecía: Tu sabiduría interior, to be published by Luciérnaga (Planeta) in September 2019.
She is now writing a book for general/trade readers, a hybrid of literary criticism and memoir of discovering "lost" women's writing during her residency at Chawton House, England: "For academics, Jane Austen is the "mother", the beginner of a tradition of women's literature. I say this is not the case, and how the library of Chawton House and Austen inspire us to look back earlier on a very rich and little-known tradition – of which Austen was only partially aware."
Literature has always been a passion for Carme, and she takes university teaching and research both as a privilege and a service. Prior to her university appointments, Carme Font worked as a literary translator, editor and reader for major publishers in Barcelona and Madrid. Among the authors she translated from English into Spanish are Peter Ackroyd, Charlotte Bronte (Tales of Angria), Nicholson Baker, Mark Twain (tales), Wilbur Smith, and Julie Otsuka. She is also drawn by teaching methodologies of advanced reading and creative writing practice, which she has been sharing for several years now in writers' workshops in Barcelona.
In 2018 Carme Font has been awarded an ERC-Starting Grant 2018 of €1.5 million for the project WINK, "Women's Invisible Ink: Trans-Genre Writing and the Gendering of Intellectual Value in Early Modernity".
Follow @ProjectWink
UAB press release: Carme Font Paz is awarded a Starting Grant.
The Guardian: Spanish academic gets €1.5m EU grant to rescue 'women's writing'.
CBC radio interview: Researcher plans to shed new light on women writers overlooked for centuries.
El Pais: Una investigadora española para feminizar el pensamiento occidental.
Terrafemina: L'Europe accorde 1,5 million d'euros pour retrouver des écrivaines perdues.
