Overview
Adam Mahler (he/they) completed a doctorate in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University in 2026 and joined Cornell University as a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in Romance Studies. Mahler studies how sound and poetic form register ecological change and the emergence of social categories across Old Spanish, Galician-Portuguese, Hebrew, and Ladino/Judeo-Spanish, with overtures to Arabic literary cultures. Mahler's work situates literary form within the material conditions of premodern community life and asks how attending to such socially precipitated forms can hone our faculties of noticing in the present.
Mahler is currently at work on a monograph, Convivial Ecologies of Medieval Iberia, a study of the soundscapes of ecological and social change in the Ibero-Romance and Hispano-Semitic literary traditions. The book investigates how poetic form illuminates premodern ecological life and social hierarchies of race, gender, and religion—all categories long intertwined with ideas of the human. A second book project examines the racial inheritance of Lachmannian textual editing, with an emphasis on aljamiado texts produced by minoritized copyists.
Mahler’s other research addresses questions of social forms in Lusophone Macau, the Portuguese Novo Cinema, and Judeo-Spanish in Central Europe, the Americas, and the Ottoman world. An active literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese, Mahler published their translation of Camilo Pessanha’s Clepsydra and Other Poems with Tagus Press at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and their bilingual edition of Shem Tov Ardutiel’s Moral Proverbs and Other Old Spanish Poems of Jewish Authorship is forthcoming in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library from Harvard University Press.
Mahler’s scholarship and translation have been supported by grants and awards from the US–Portugal Fulbright Commission, Spain’s Ministerio de Cultura, and PEN America. Mahler's articles have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Speculum, and Hispanic Review, among others. In 2025, Mahler was elected a Corresponding Member of the Institute of Medieval Studies at NOVA University Lisbon.
Mahler approaches teaching as an extension of their work as a translator, with a dedicated commitment to making premodern, Luso-Hispanic, and Sephardic literatures accessible to students of all backgrounds. Before joining Cornell, Mahler designed and taught the first Ladino courses at Harvard and UC Berkeley; Berkeley’s offerings have since continued to expand. Mahler has also taught Ladino in community and adult learner settings.
Mahler encourages undergraduates and graduate students to reach out about Luso-Hispanic and Sephardic literature, translation, and related fields during office hours or by appointment.
Research Focus
- Ecocriticism: Theories and Methods
- Medieval Iberian Studies: Galician-Portuguese cantigas (troubadour poetry), Old Spanish verse (mester de clerecía and epic), and Hebrew and Arabic literature
- Race, Gender, and Ethnoreligious Difference in Pre/Early Modern Iberia
- Ladino/Judeo-Spanish: Pre-Expulsion Sociolect Formation; Italo-Sephardic Humanism; Ottoman Jewry; Sephardic New York
- The Luso-Hispanic Pacific: Macau
Publications
Recent Articles and Book Chapters
“Cognitive Economy and Vernacular Labor in Shem Tov ben Isaac Ardutiel’s Los proverbios morales,” Hispanic Review (forthcoming, Autumn 2026).
“Sailing the Franco-Portuguese Seas in Colonial Macau: A Blue Poetics of Citation in Camilo Pessanha’s Clepsydra,” PMLA 141, no. 1 (2026), 52–70.
“Making Sail and Making Race in Medieval and Early Modern Portuguese Literature,” in The Routledge Companion to Race in Early Modern Artistic, Material, and Visual Production, edited by Nicholas Jones, Christina Lee, and Dominique Polanco (Routledge, 2025), 25–35.
“‘Ai flores, ai flores do verde pino’: The Ecopoetics of the Galician-Portuguese Pine Forest,” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 99, no. 3 (2024), 826–57.
“‘Em este som de negrada’: Sounds of Blackness in the Medieval Iberian Lyric,” La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, 52, no. 1 (2023), 139–177.
“Camilo Pessanha’s Missing City: Race, Poetry, and Urban Writing in Portuguese Macau,” Portuguese Studies 39, no. 1 (2023), 32–49.
“Descriptive Poetics and the Arte de trovar in the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 15, no. 1 (2023), 82–105.