Bárbara Mujica is a Professor of Spanish at Georgetown University and President Emerita of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater. She is specialist in Early Modern Spanish literature who has written extensively on mysticism, the pastoral novel, seventeenth-century theater, and Cervantes. Her latest books are Text and Playtext: A New Anthology of Early Modern Spanish Theater (Yale University Press, 2014), Teresa de Ãvila, Woman of letters (Vanderbilt University Press (2009), Teresa de Jesús: Espiritualidad y feminismo (Orto / U. Minnestoa, 2006), Women Writers of Early Modern Spain:Sophia’s Daughters (Yale University Press, 2004) and In addition, she has written Et in Arcadia Ego: Essays on Death in the Pastoral Novel. (1990, co-authored with Bruno Damiani), Iberian Pastoral Characters (1986), and Calderon’s Characters: An Existential Point of View (1980). She has edited El texto puesto en escena: Estudios sobre la comedia en honor a Everett W. Hesse (2000, with Anita Stoll; published with a full grant from the Association of Hispanic Classical Theater), Looking at the Comedia in the Year of the Quincentennial (1993, with Sharon Voros), and Texto y espectáculo (1989). She also edited Comedia Studies at the End of the Century, a special issue of the journal Hispania (Sept. 1999). In October 2010 she curated an exhibition of early modern women’s devotional writing entitled Portraits in Piety at Lauinger Library, Georgetown University. She is currently working on a study of the correspondence of the disciples of Saint Teresa in Portugal, France, and the Low Countries.
Mujica’s articles have appeared in many scholarly journals and collections. The most recent is “Healing on the Margins: Ana de San Bartolomé, Convent Nurse,†scheduled to appear later this year in Early Modern Studies.
Bárbara Mujica is also a novelist and short story writer. Her latest full-length work of fiction is I Am Venus, based on the life of Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. Sister Teresa, based on the life of Teresa de Avila, has been adapted for the stage by Coco Blignaut and opened in Los Angeles last November. Frida, a novel about Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, was a Quality Paperback Book Club feature. Frida has appeared in seventeen languages and was a bestseller in the United States, Germany, and  Spain. Bárbara Mujica has won several prizes for her fiction, including the E. L. Doctorow International Fiction Award, the Pangolin Prize, and a Maryland Writer’s Association prize for I Am Venus in the category “historical fiction.’
Dr. Mujica is a professor of Spanish at Georgetown University, where she teaches early modern Spanish literature and directs El Retablo, a Spanish-language theater group. She was also a judge for the Helen Hayes Awards, an organization that promotes excellence on Washington-area stages by reviewing plays and honoring accomplishments in different aspects of theater.
Dr. Mujica’s topic for 2015 Carmelite Symposium is “The Spread of Teresian Spirituality: The Beginnings of the Discalced Carmelite Expansion.”