Ellynn Loftus

Education

B.A., Spanish and English, University of Mary Washington, 2015

M.A., Romance Languages and Literatures, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2018

About Ellynn

Originally from Chester, Virginia, Ellynn completed her undergraduate degree in Spanish and English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where she wrote her undergraduate thesis on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz and her villancicos about Saint Catherine of Alexandria. After taking a gap year, Ellynn decided to pursue her graduate studies at UNC-Chapel Hill starting in the fall of 2016, where she earned her M.A. in 2018 and wrote her M.A. thesis on the construction of sainthood and the representation of Saint Teresa of Ávila in an early seventeenth-century hagiographic comedia. She is currently a third-year PhD student in the program and is also working towards earning a Graduate Certificate in Women's and Gender Studies.

Her current research interests in Spanish and Latin American literature include Golden Age literature, eighteenth-century literature, early educational tracts, the medical humanities, gender theory, proto-feminist texts, and women-authored comedias and prose works such as those by Leonor de la Cueva y Silva, Ana Caro Mallén de Soto, María de Zayas, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. On the English literature side, she enjoyed studying eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century British and American literature and early feminist works and hopes to incorporate these interests into her research in the future.