Paul Michael Johnson (Ph.D., U.C. Irvine) is Associate Research Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.  To date, his scholarship has drawn primarily on the history of emotion, the senses, the body, and performance as theoretical modes of inquiry into early modern Spanish literary culture.  Yet his writing on such problems as race, gender, translation, and popular culture also places pre-modern Iberia into conversation with urgent contemporary debates, while crossing borders to encompass North Africa, the Americas, East Asia, and the Global Hispanophone.

Johnson serves on the editorial board of the New Hispanisms series at Louisiana State University Press and the advisory board of the Ibero-American Society for the History of Emotions and Experience (SIHEX).  He also recently completed a term on the executive council of the Cervantes Society of America. 

At Hopkins, Professor Johnson is slated to teach a graduate seminar on Staging Race in Early Modern Drama and, with Mackenzie Zalin, a course on Ephemeral Spanish Drama, which will leverage the Sheridan Libraries’ outstanding collection of comedias sueltas and other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theatrical ephemera. 

Previously, Johnson was Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at DePauw University.

Johnson is the author of Affective Geographies: Cervantes, Emotion, and the Literary Mediterranean (University of Toronto Press, 2020).  Awarded the distinction of Outstanding Academic Title by Choice, it is the first monograph to recuperate a place for literature in the multidisciplinary field of Mediterranean Studies.  The book argues that the literary is as influential in constructing the Mediterranean as are its geomorphological, climatic, or economic features—those which, since Fernand Braudel’s mid-century study, have dominated scholarship of the region.  Affective Geographies shows how Cervantes’s writing—with its uncommon focus on the Moorish, Islamic, and North African experience—unsettles misconceptions about the Mediterranean we have inherited today, thus ramifying beyond fiction to alter the broader psychological imaginary and longue durée cultural landscape.

In addition to his book, Johnson’s essays are published or forthcoming in journals like PMLA, Renaissance Quarterly, MLN, and Exemplaria.  His work appears in the Norton Critical Edition of “Don Quijote,” and he also authored the critical introduction to the first modern edition of Luis Vélez de Guevara’s Celos, amor y venganza (Juan de la Cuesta Press, 2018).  His research has been supported by the Fulbright, the Great Lakes College Association/Mellon Foundation, and, in 2023–24, a residential fellowship at Harvard’s Houghton Library. 

Johnson’s current book project, tentatively entitled Turning Red: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Blushing in the Global Early Modern, builds on his expertise in emotion, gesture, and the body as intensified sites of cultural othering.  It argues that, long before a nineteenth-century fascination with blushing in literature and biological science, the Renaissance was pivotal in expanding, legislating, and transforming the meanings of the blush, as well as in construing it as a marker of racial difference.  Tracking the blush across national and conceptual borders offers new perspectives on race-making in the early modern world, where an obsession with the dermal visibility of the blush indexed the construction of whiteness and the enforcement of blood purity statutes.  It also affords a view of how social and poetic idealizations of so-called fair skin confronted such realities as the presence of the African diaspora in Europe, the opening of trade routes with the Far East, an awareness of Native Peoples in newly conquered American territories, and the politics of mestizaje in colonial New Spain.  Yet Turning Red also contends that, as the blush’s symbolism and legibility morphed over time and in response to literary tastes, popular trends, theological movements, scientific advancements, legal resolutions, demographic changes, and intercultural encounters, it acquired performative dimensions that troubled nascent attempts at racial categorization that their authors expected the blush to help consolidate.