Maya Feile Tomes grew up in London and went on to spend over fifteen years (off and on) in Cambridge, where she first studied Classics, later specialised in Hispanic literary culture, and ultimately took up the post of Lorna Close Lecturer in Spanish at Murray Edwards College, which she held until September 2024. She was also an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Classics. Her area of focus is Latin American literature during the colonial period (C15^th–C18^th), considering how textual culture developed across the Atlantic – and how the Atlantic emerged in literary culture. She is particularly interested in the literature of encounter and in the movement of materials, ideas and individuals across the transatlantic context. This permits her to combine her interests in early modern studies, comparative Iberian studies and classical receptions (i.e., the later fate of the Greco-Roman tradition), and in the postcolonial consequences of all the above. She has published across these areas, both individually and in concert with international colleagues. Key examples include Brill's Companion to Classics in the Early Americas (Brill, 2021) and Sepúlveda on the Spanish Invasion of the Americas: Defending Empire, Debating Las Casas (OUP, 2023). Her current collaborative work centres on a long-neglected neo-Latin epic poem by a C18th Jesuit from Catalonia via Paraguay. With her colleague Dr Bram van der Velden (University of Groningen), she is working to produce the first English edition of the text; she is also co-leading an interdisciplinary group to produce a Portuguese version. These projects speak to her other major interest in the field of translation and translation studies. She has extensive experience both as a translator and as a medical interpreter, and is a founder member of the Cambridge Translation Studies Network (CTSN). She was for several years also the convenor of the Cambridge Classical Reception Seminar Series (CCRSS), and now sits on the Editorial Board of the Classical Receptions Journal (CRJ), as well as of the Bloomsbury Early Modern Texts and Anthologies series.

Prior to starting at Glasgow in January 2025, Maya held a visiting position at the Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR) in Curitiba, Brazil. She has also lived in Argentina, Spain and Belgium, and spent further stints in cities from Siena to Santiago de Chile. After these and other peregrinations, she is delighted to have found her way here, not least because – despite what her accent suggests – she is half Scottish.

• Colonial literary culture, esp. from Mexico, Peru and the Southern Cone
• Argentinian literature
• 'New World' poetry and poetics
• Classical receptions in non-Mediterranean contexts
• the Latin of Latin America
• Literary representation of space
• Literature of exile
• Iberian Jesuit literature
• Multilingualism and/in canon formation
• 'Early' colonial literature
• 'Late' colonial literature
• Postcolonialism
• Decoloniality

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Prior publications

Fellowship via CAPES-PrInt (Programa Institucional de Internacionalização) Professor/a Visitante no Brasil federal funding scheme - 2024.

Maya welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students with projects falling within any of her areas of interest.

At the University of Cambridge, Maya taught widely across Hispanic culture in the Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages (MMLL) and also for the Faculty of Classics, where she pioneered the first graduate module in classical reception on the MPhil in Classics. This was initially called 'Classics at the Edges' (later 'Classics: The Next Frontier?') and continues to run, in ever-evolving forms, to this day. At the UFPR in Brazil, she taught a postgraduate option entitled 'Translatio transatlântica'. At Glasgow, Maya is involved in teaching across a variety of areas in Spanish language, literature and translation, and, from 2025-26, will be running a new Honours module entitled 'Literary New Worlds: Transatlantic Encounter and Exchange in Hispanic America'. Tell all your friends!

Professional memberships

Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland (AHGBI)

Conference on Latin American History (CLAH)

International Association for Neo-Latin Studies (IANLS)

Latin American Studies Association (LASA)

Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry (SRBHP)