Adam Mahler

Adam Mahler 

Ph.D. Candidate, Romance Languages and Literatures
Boylston Hall – 4th Floor
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138

Email: amahler@g.harvard.edu
CV (PDF)
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I received a B.A. in English and Portuguese Literature from Yale College in 2017. I am currently completing my dissertation on premodern environmental writing at Harvard University. In 2025, I was appointed Corresponding Member of the Institute of Medieval Studies at NOVA University Lisbon.  I study the relationship between literary form and social change in the Iberian world, that is, Portugal, Spain, and their former colonial territories in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. 

I place a special emphasis on how the poetries of the medieval and early modern periods encode unique relationships to the natural environment, ethnorace, and multilingualism, though my research extends well into the modern period. Working comparatively across Portuguese, Spanish, Hebrew, as well as Ladino and Judeo-Portuguese, my dissertation project shows the impact of ecological exploration and exploitation on poetic form and ethnic representation across time. 

My scholarly articles examine these topics in texts written as early as 1039 and as recently as 2017. I have published a number of scholarly articles on Camilo Pessanha and Fernando Pessoa, two key writers at the head of Portugal's modernist movement in the early twentieth century. Beyond my work in medieval and early modern studies, current projects include a study of Brazilian modernists' metabolizations of the traditional Portuguese songbook. I also have a longstanding interest in the Portuguese and creole-based literatures of colonial Macau.

As a literary translator from Spanish, Portuguese, and regional/diasporic Iberian languages,  I am committed to broadening less-known works’ circle of readers; I consider translation to be among the closest forms of reading, and a means for challenging the limits of mainstream reception. You can find my first book of translations, Camilo Pessanha’s Clepsydra and Other Poems (Tagus Press at the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth, April 2022), on Bookshop.org or Amazon.  My annotated translation and edition of Shem Tov Ardutiel's Moral Proverbs and Other Old Castilian Poems Written by Jews is forthcoming with Harvard University Press's Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library.

My research and translations have been supported by grants from the US-Portugal Fulbright Commission, Spain's Ministry of Sport and Culture, and PEN America. My articles have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Speculum, La corónica, and Hispanic Review, among others. I am a regular contributor to the Gulbenkian Foundation's Colóquio/Letras, for which I review contemporary Portuguese poetry.

With an eye towards documenting endangered Jewish languages, I designed and taught Harvard's first-ever Ladino course, LADINO16: Beginning Ladino, a primer in historical Ladino grammar and survey of Sephardic literature produced before and after the inquisition. I also taught the first courses in Ladino at UC–Berkeley, where I currently head online instruction in Judeo-Spanish literature as a Lecturer of Jewish Studies. I welcome contact with scholars and educators interested in promoting and preserving Ladino in its many forms. 

Research interests: literature and the environment; early ethnorace and literary racialization; constructions of Luso-African identity;  Iberian and Ibero-American Jewry, Ladino; Sephardic–West African links; colonial Latin American literature; cantigas, troubadour poetry; medieval gender and sexuality; translation theory; Pessoa, Iberian and Ibero-American modernism; Lusophone Macau and the Phillipines.