# Adam Mahler ![Adam Mahler Portrait - Curly haired person with mustache, red glasses, and blue denim jacket with blue sherpa cotton collar ](/sites/g/files/omnuum10646/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2025-12/cropped_circle_image-4.png?itok=XiQpB91Y) ## **Adam Mahler** Ph.D. Candidate, Romance Languages and Literatures Boylston Hall – 4th Floor Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138 **Email:** [**CV (PDF)**](http://bit.ly/4ifoGBc) [**Personal Site**](https://adammahler.net) 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 ](/file_url/133)(Tagus Press at the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth, April 2022), on [Bookshop.org](https://bookshop.org/books/clepsydra-and-other-poems/9781951470081) or [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1951470087?ie=UTF8&linkCode=as2&tag=umasspress0a-20). 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](/file_url/132), 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. ## Selected publications Download 6 citations download- [BibTeX](/bibcite/export?pager_style=no_pager&number_of_items=6&sort_field=title--asc&&content_filter%5B0%5D=742556&content_filter%5B1%5D=694434&content_filter%5B2%5D=698656&content_filter%5B3%5D=701441&content_filter%5B4%5D=694608&content_filter%5B5%5D=694073&&format=bibtex) - [EndNote X3 XML](/bibcite/export?pager_style=no_pager&number_of_items=6&sort_field=title--asc&&content_filter%5B0%5D=742556&content_filter%5B1%5D=694434&content_filter%5B2%5D=698656&content_filter%5B3%5D=701441&content_filter%5B4%5D=694608&content_filter%5B5%5D=694073&&format=endnote8) - [EndNote 7 XML](/bibcite/export?pager_style=no_pager&number_of_items=6&sort_field=title--asc&&content_filter%5B0%5D=742556&content_filter%5B1%5D=694434&content_filter%5B2%5D=698656&content_filter%5B3%5D=701441&content_filter%5B4%5D=694608&content_filter%5B5%5D=694073&&format=endnote7) - [Endnote tagged](/bibcite/export?pager_style=no_pager&number_of_items=6&sort_field=title--asc&&content_filter%5B0%5D=742556&content_filter%5B1%5D=694434&content_filter%5B2%5D=698656&content_filter%5B3%5D=701441&content_filter%5B4%5D=694608&content_filter%5B5%5D=694073&&format=tagged) - [Marc](/bibcite/export?pager_style=no_pager&number_of_items=6&sort_field=title--asc&&content_filter%5B0%5D=742556&content_filter%5B1%5D=694434&content_filter%5B2%5D=698656&content_filter%5B3%5D=701441&content_filter%5B4%5D=694608&content_filter%5B5%5D=694073&&format=marc) - [PubMedId](/bibcite/export?pager_style=no_pager&number_of_items=6&sort_field=title--asc&&content_filter%5B0%5D=742556&content_filter%5B1%5D=694434&content_filter%5B2%5D=698656&content_filter%5B3%5D=701441&content_filter%5B4%5D=694608&content_filter%5B5%5D=694073&&format=pubmed_id) - [RIS](/bibcite/export?pager_style=no_pager&number_of_items=6&sort_field=title--asc&&content_filter%5B0%5D=742556&content_filter%5B1%5D=694434&content_filter%5B2%5D=698656&content_filter%5B3%5D=701441&content_filter%5B4%5D=694608&content_filter%5B5%5D=694073&&format=ris) Adam Mahler. “[Sailing the Franco-Portuguese Seas in Colonial Macau: A Blue Poetics of Citation in Camilo Pessanha’s Clepsydra](/publications/sailing-franco-portuguese-seas-colonial-macau-blue-poetics-citation-camilo)”. PMLA Adam Mahler. “[Sailing the Franco-Portuguese Seas in Colonial Macau: A Blue Poetics of Citation in Camilo Pessanha’s Clepsydra](/publications/sailing-franco-portuguese-seas-colonial-macau-blue-poetics-citation-camilo)”. PMLA - add\_circle do\_not\_disturb\_on Abstract This article examines the twentieth-century Macau-based Portuguese poet Camilo Pessanha’s singular contribution to the Portuguese tradition of maritime literature. I argue that Pessanha seized on fluid citational practices, already latent in iconic works... Adam Mahler. 2024. “[’Ai Flores, Ai Flores Do Verde Pino’: The Ecopoetics of the Galician-Portuguese Pine Forest](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/730776)”. Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, 99, 3, Pp. 826–857 Adam Mahler. 2024. “[’Ai Flores, Ai Flores Do Verde Pino’: The Ecopoetics of the Galician-Portuguese Pine Forest](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/730776)”. Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, 99, 3, Pp. 826–857 - add\_circle do\_not\_disturb\_on Abstract - [ descriptionPublisher's Version](https://doi.org/10.1086/730776) Denis of Portugal’s “Ai flores, ai flores do verde pino” \[Oh flowers, oh flowers of the green pine\] is the medieval monarch’s most famous cantiga de amigo and one of the best-known songs of the Galician-Portuguese tradition. Many have read Denis’s “pine... - [ descriptionPublisher's Version](https://doi.org/10.1086/730776) Adam Mahler. “[Cognitive Economy and Vernacular Labor in Shem Tov Ardutiel’s Proverbios Morales](/publications/radical-soundscapes-shem-tov-ardutiels-moral-proverbs)”. Hispanic Review, Special Issue: Marxism and the Premodern Archive Adam Mahler. “[Cognitive Economy and Vernacular Labor in Shem Tov Ardutiel’s Proverbios Morales](/publications/radical-soundscapes-shem-tov-ardutiels-moral-proverbs)”. Hispanic Review, Special Issue: Marxism and the Premodern Archive - add\_circle do\_not\_disturb\_on Abstract Scouring Shem Tov Ardutiel’s *Proverbios morales* for its insights into caste, class, and poetic practice in the fourteenth century, I argue that his wisdom poem attests to an emerging cognitive economy and the politicization of the Romance vernacular from... Adam Mahler. “[’En Este Som de Negrada’: Sounds of Blackness in the Medieval Iberian Lyric](/publications/songs-denigration)”. La Corónica, 52.1, Special Issue: Black Timescapes: Tapestries of Africa in Premodern Iberia Adam Mahler. “[’En Este Som de Negrada’: Sounds of Blackness in the Medieval Iberian Lyric](/publications/songs-denigration)”. La Corónica, 52.1, Special Issue: Black Timescapes: Tapestries of Africa in Premodern Iberia - add\_circle do\_not\_disturb\_on Abstract This article examines a Galician-Portuguese satirical song by the troubadour Lopo Lias (ca. 1190–1260) that contains a charged reference to the som de negrada, or "blackened-up music." Leading scholars of the cantigas have taken the term as a reference to... Adam Mahler. 2023. “[Camilo Pessanha’s Missing City](/publications/camilo-pessanhas-missing-city)”. Portuguese Studies, 39, 1, Pp. 32–49 Adam Mahler. 2023. “[Camilo Pessanha’s Missing City](/publications/camilo-pessanhas-missing-city)”. Portuguese Studies, 39, 1, Pp. 32–49 - add\_circle do\_not\_disturb\_on Abstract - [ descriptionPublisher's Version](http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/port.2023.a900049) - [ picture\_as\_pdfps\_39-1\_mahler](/sites/g/files/omnuum10646/files/amahler/files/ps_39-1_mahler53.pdf) The Portuguese poet Camilo Pessanha’s long stint in Macau has been the subject of much scholarly debate and biographical intrigue. Critics have tended either to deny the city’s poetic import altogether, erroneously claiming that Pessanha wrote virtually... - [ descriptionPublisher's Version](http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/port.2023.a900049) - [ picture\_as\_pdfps\_39-1\_mahler](/sites/g/files/omnuum10646/files/amahler/files/ps_39-1_mahler53.pdf) Adam Mahler. 2023. “[Descriptive Poetics and the Arte de Trovar in the Cancioneiro Da Biblioteca Nacional](/publications/descriptive-poetics-and-arte-de-trovar-cancioneiro-da-biblioteca-nacional-0)”. Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 15, 1, Pp. 82-105 Adam Mahler. 2023. “[Descriptive Poetics and the Arte de Trovar in the Cancioneiro Da Biblioteca Nacional](/publications/descriptive-poetics-and-arte-de-trovar-cancioneiro-da-biblioteca-nacional-0)”. Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 15, 1, Pp. 82-105 - add\_circle do\_not\_disturb\_on Abstract - [ descriptionPublisher's Version](https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ZXFX2NK8ET4FGP7JAEFT/full?target=10.1080/17546559.2023.2168026) - [ picture\_as\_pdfdescriptive\_poetics\_and\_t...](/sites/g/files/omnuum10646/files/amahler/files/descriptive_poetics_and_the_arte_de_trovar_in_the_cancioneiro_da_biblioteca_nacional_01.pdf) Critics have long evaluated the anonymous treatise on versification nestled in the *Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional* — often called the *Arte de trovar* — against the roughly contemporaneous *artes poeticae* composed in *langue d'oc*. While our understanding... - [ descriptionPublisher's Version](https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ZXFX2NK8ET4FGP7JAEFT/full?target=10.1080/17546559.2023.2168026) - [ picture\_as\_pdfdescriptive\_poetics\_and\_t...](/sites/g/files/omnuum10646/files/amahler/files/descriptive_poetics_and_the_arte_de_trovar_in_the_cancioneiro_da_biblioteca_nacional_01.pdf) [ See more publications arrow\_circle\_right ](/publications) ## Translations - [Shem Tov Ardutiel's Moral Proverbs and Other Old Castilian Poems Written by Jews](/publications/shem-tov-ardutiels-moral-proverbs-and-other-old-castilian-poems-written-jews), translated, edited, and annotated by Adam Mahler, The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library at Harvard University Press (forthcoming). - [Camilo Pessanha's Clepsydra and Other Poems,](https://www.umasspress.com/9781951470081/clepsydra-and-other-poems/) translated and annotated by Adam Mahler, with a preface by K. David Jackson, Tagus Press at the University of Massachusetts–Darmouth, April 2022.