ESTHER FERNÁNDEZ (esther.fernandez@rice.edu) is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures at Rice University where she specializes in Iberian literary, visual, and cultural studies from the Medieval period to the twenty-first century. Dr. Fernández’s journal articles have principally attended to eroticism, gender, and performance analysis of classical theater’s most contemporary adaptations. She is the author of Eros en escena: Erotismo en el teatro del Siglo de Oro (Juan de la Cuesta, 2009) and of multiple scholarly articles and essay collections focusing on theater and performance practices primarily from Early Modernity, but also analyzed through a transhistorical perspective. Her new monograph, titled To Embody the Marvelous: The Making of Illusions in Early Modern Spain (forthcoming in 2021, Vanderbilt UP), engages with articulations of notions of wonder by examining performance objects in ceremonial, theatrical, and social contexts.