This is the second talk in the Romance Studies Faculty Lecture Series.

Julia Chang is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Studies, a member of the core faculty in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and affiliated faculty in the Southeast Asia Program. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Language and Literatures with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley. She has also taught at Brown University and San Quentin State Prison. Her areas of specialization include nineteenth-century Spanish literature and culture with a special focus on the realist novel, gender studies, and medical hygiene. More recently, she has begun research on Hispano-Filipino relations and late Spanish imperialism.

Professor Chang's current book project (under review)--Blood Novels: Fictions of Caste and Chastity in Modern Spain--examines the cultural and theoretical significance of blood and bloodlines in Spanish realism. In reading fiction alongside medical literature, Blood Novels demonstrates that the politics of blood played a decisive role in social hierarchies and the management of life in an era of belated modernization and imperial decline.