Paul Michael Johnson is Associate Research Professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University.  To date, his scholarship has drawn primarily on the history of emotion, the senses, the body, and performance as sites of racial and gendered othering in early modern literary culture.  He has also written on such topics as translation, film, public monuments, and popular culture, often placing pre-modern Iberia into conversation with global issues and twenty-first-century debates.

Johnson is the author of Affective Geographies: Cervantes, Emotion, and the Literary Mediterranean (University of Toronto Press, 2021) and the co-editor, with Nicholas R. Jones, of Cervantine Futures: Reading Cervantes after the Critical Turn (Vanderbilt University Press, in press). He has also authored some fifty publications in edited volumes, collections, popular media, and peer-reviewed journals such as PMLA, Renaissance Quarterly, Atlantic Studies, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, MLN, and Exemplaria.  His research has been supported by the Fulbright, Harvard’s Houghton Library, the RaceB4Race Second Book Institute, and the Great Lakes College Association/Mellon Foundation.  He is a member of the international research group Cultural History of Gestures, sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. 

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 has been elected to the MLA Delegate Assembly, the Executive Committee of the MLA’s Mediterranean Forum, and the Executive Council of the Cervantes Society of America.  As of 2026, he will be the editor of Cervantes: Journal of the Cervantes Society of America.

At Hopkins, he serves on the advisory board of the Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance, and as affiliated faculty for the Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies.  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, 2021).  Distinguished as an 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 work has been published in peer-reviewed journals like PMLA, Renaissance Quarterly, Atlantic Studies, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, MLN, and Exemplaria, and in such collections as the Norton Critical Edition of “Don Quijote,” (2020), The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe: From Inquisition to Inquiry (U of Toronto P, 2020), and Soundscapes of the Early Modern Hispanophone and Lusophone Worlds (Routledge, 2024).  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, Harvard’s Houghton Library, the RaceB4Race Second Book Institute, and the Great Lakes College Association/Mellon Foundation.  He is a member of the international research group Cultural History of Gestures, sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

Johnson’s current book project, tentatively entitled Scarlet Insurgencies: Blushing and Racemaking in the Global Renaissance, 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 claimed American territories, and the politics of mestizaje in colonial New Spain.  Yet Scarlet Insurgencies 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.

Since joining Hopkins in 2024, Professor Johnson has offered the graduate seminar Staging Race in Early Modern Drama.  At the undergraduate level, he has taught a course on Don Quijote and, with Mackenzie Zalin, a seminar on Ephemeral Spanish Drama, which leveraged the JHU libraries’ outstanding collection of comedias sueltas and other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theatrical ephemera.  In Spring 2026, he is slated to teach courses on Early Psychology in Literature, Art, and Science and The African Diaspora in Early Modern Iberia.

Books

Affective Geographies: Cervantes, Emotion, and the Literary Mediterranean.  Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2020.  (Toronto Iberic Series, 328 pp.)  https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487536398.

Cervantine Futures: Reading Cervantes after the Critical Turn.  Co-edited with Nicholas R. Jones.  Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2026.  (Hispanic Issues Series; nineteen chapters + introduction; in press)

Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals

“Cervantes’s Black Castrato and the Racial Politics of Timbre.”  Sound in the Early Atlantic.  Ed. Sarah Finley and Elisabeth Le Guin.  Spec. issue of Atlantic Studies.  (Forthcoming)

“At First Blush: Race, Rouge, and the Transnational Performance of Turning Red.”  Renaissance Quarterly 78.1 (Spring 2025): 65–94. 

“Early Modern Deepfakes: Honing Critical Spectatorship through Pixelated Performances.”  Anti-Disinformation Pedagogy: Tackling the Power of Manipulative Media.  Ed. David Castillo and Bradley Nelson.  Hispanic Issues On Line 32 (2024): 201–21.

“Errant Translation; or, Lin Shu’s Don Quixote and the Paybacks of Back-Translating.”  Translation.  Ed. A.E.B. Coldiron.  Spec. issue of PMLA 138.3 (May 2023): 567–83.

“Sounds of Fury: The Aural Poetics of the Voice and Imperial Violence in Cervantes’ Mediterranean.”  Aural Culture and Poetics in the Early Modern Hispanic World: Sound, Rhythm, and Music.  Ed. Mary B. Quinn and Steven Hutchinson.  Spec. issue of Bulletin of Spanish Studies 100.2–3 (2023): 369–92.

“Tirso de Molina’s El melancólico and the Performative Authenticity of Early Modern (Pseudo-)Melancholy.”  El morbo de la melancolía en España / The Morbid Condition of Melancholy in Spain.  Ed. Santiago Morales-Rivera.  Spec. issue of eHumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies 53 (2022): 49–66.

“Navegar en el (a)mar: Una talasología de los afectos en el Persiles.”  Historias septentrionales cervantinas.  Ed. Randi Lise Davenport.  Spec. issue of Hipogrifo: Revista de Literatura y Cultura del Siglo de Oro 7.1 (2019): 137–46. 

“The End(lessnes)s of Infamy: Agamben, Enjambment, and Embodiment in a Cervantine Stanza.”  The Last Word: The Ends of Poetry, Agamben, and Early Modern Spain.  Ed. Sonia Velázquez.  Spec. issue of MLN 132.2 (March 2017): 494–506. 

“The Trials of Language: Apophasis, Ineffability, and the Mystical Rhetoric of Love in the Persiles.”  ‘Si ya por atrevido no sale con las manos en la cabeza’: El legado poético del “Persiles” cuatrocientos años después.  Ed. Mercedes Alcalá Galán, Antonio Cortijo Ocaña, and Francisco Layna Ranz.  Spec. issue of eHumanista / Cervantes 5 (2016): 297–316.

"Of Fine Arts and Fine Feelings: Mapping Affect across Lessing’s Laocoön, Lord Carteret’s Quijote, and Oldfield’s ‘Advertencias.’”  Thinking About Affect in Culture and Art.  Ed. Katarzyna Paszkiewicz.  Spec. issue of 452°F: Journal of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature 14 (2016): 121–37.

“’Salido a la vergüenza’: Inquisition, Penality, and a Cervantine View of Mediterranean ‘Values.’”  Cervantes y el Mediterráneo / Cervantes and the Mediterranean.  Ed. Steven Hutchinson and Antonio Cortijo Ocaña.  Spec. issue of eHumanista / Cervantes 2 (2013): 340–61. 

*Excerpted as “Don Quijote in the Oxcart: Shame and Shadows of the Inquisition.”  Norton Critical Edition of “Don Quijote” by Miguel de Cervantes.  2nd ed.  Trans. Burton Raffel.  Ed. and trans. Diana de Armas Wilson.  New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2020.  791–97.

*Spanish translation: “’Salido a la vergüenza’: Inquisición, penalidad y una perspectiva cervantina de los ‘valores’ mediterráneos.”  Analecta Malacitana Electrónica 40 (June 2016): 3–36.]

“A Soldier’s Shame: The Specter of Captivity in ‘La historia del cautivo.’”  Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 31.2 (Fall 2011): 153–84. 

Selected Chapters in Edited Volumes, Collections, and Anthologies

“Echoes of Lepanto: Reliving the Sounds of War in Cervantes’s Literature.”  Solicited for edited volume on Cervantes and the Unsayable: New Approaches to Trauma Studies.  Ed. Stephen Hessel and Ryan Schmitz.  Louisiana State University Press.  (Under review)

“Cervantes, per Verse: Misogynist Poetics of Pastoral Incels.”  Cervantes, Women, and Perversity.  Ed. Sonia Pérez Villanueva, Leyla Rouhi, and Elizabeth Spragins.  Palgrave Macmillan.  (Under review)

“Cervantine Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Sexuality, Age, and Ability in ‘El celoso extremeño.’”  Cervantine Futures: Reading Cervantes after the Critical Turn.  Ed. Nicholas R. Jones and Paul Michael Johnson.  Vanderbilt University Press.  (In press)

“Quixotic Allyship? The Colonial, Transnational, and Racialized Legacies of Cervantes’s Statue.”  On the Uses and Abuses of Early Modern Spanish Culture, Volume 1: Mediating and Decolonizing Spain’s “Golden Age.”  Ed. Chad Leahy and Elizabeth Spragins.  Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025.  (In press)

“Emotive Tapestries: Upturning Affect in Cervantes’s Don Quixote.”  Teaching Emotions in World Literature.  Ed. Andreea Marculescu and Charles-Louis Morand-Métivier.  Modern Language Association.  (In press)

“Captive Listeners: Antonio de Sosa’s Topographia as Acoustic Ethnography of Early Modern Algiers.”  Soundscapes of the Early Modern Hispanophone and Lusophone Worlds.  Ed. Víctor Sierra Matute.  New York: Routledge, 2024.  256–67. 

“La traducción (re)negada.”  Cervantes entre amigos: Ensayos en homenaje de Diana de Armas Wilson.  Ed. Conxita Domènech and Andrés Lema-Hincapié.  Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 2024.  170–82.

“The (Mediterranean) World Is Not Enough: Locating Europe’s Global South in For Your Eyes Only.”  Global James Bond: (Re)Imagining and Transplanting a Popular Culture Icon.  Ed. Lisa Funnell and Klaus Dodds.  Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2023.  135–48.

“’Muchas y muy verdaderas señales’: The Theatrics of Truth and Sincerity of Fiction in La Galatea.”  Drawing the Curtain: Cervantes’s Theatrical Revelations.  Ed. Esther Fernández and Adrienne L. Martín.  Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2022.  277–305. 

“Feeling Certainty, Performing Sincerity: The Emotional Hermeneutics of Truth in Inquisitorial and Theatrical Practice.”  The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe: From Inquisition to Inquiry, 1550–1700.  Ed. Barbara Fuchs and Mercedes García-Arenal.  Toronto and Los Angeles: University of Toronto Press / UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2020.  50–79. 

“Estudio introductorio” [Critical Introduction].  Celos, amor y venganza, o No hay mal que por bien no venga.  By Luis Vélez de Guevara.  Ed. William R. Manson and C. George Peale.  Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 2018.  11–41.

“Las tecnologías cervantinas del yo: Autoescritura y afectividad en Don Quijote.”  Anuario de Estudios Cervantinos, Vol. 9: Cervantes y sus enemigos.  Ed. Eduardo Urbina and Jesús G. Maestro.  Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2013.  245–58.

“Don Quijote avergonzado: Trayectoria de un afecto en Cervantes.”  Pictavia aurea: Actas del IX Congreso de la Asociación Internacional “Siglo de Oro.”  Ed. Alain Bègue and Emma Herrán Alonso.  Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2013.  477–84. 

“Expulsión forzada e integración forzosa: Reflexiones quijotescas sobre la tolerancia multicultural histórica y actual.”  Gaceta Hispánica de Madrid 3 (June 2006): 1–16.

Public-Facing Writing, Reviews, and Other Short Essays

“Polyphonic Prosimetrum: New Approaches to Cervantes’s Poetry.”  MLN 140.2 (March 2025): 485–91. 

Review of Iberian Babel: Translation and Multilingualism in the Medieval and the Early Modern Mediterranean, ed. Michelle M. Hamilton and Nuria Silleras-Fernandez.  Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022. Renaissance Quarterly 78.2 (Summer 2025): 610–11. 

“To Hear with Early Ears: Hearkening to Premodern Sound Studies.”  Exemplaria: Medieval / Early Modern / Theory 36.1 (2024): 98–108.

“Peninsula.”  Yale Iberian Connections Glossary: Medieval and Early Modern Studies and Contemporary Critical Thought 20 February 2023.

Review of Cervantes’ Architectures: The Dangers Outside, by Frederick A. de Armas.  Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2022.  Bulletin of Spanish Studies 100.6 (2023): 928–29. 

Review of The Arts of Encounter: Christians, Muslims, and the Power of Images in Early Modern Spain, by Catherine Infante.  Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2022.  Cervantes: Journal of the Cervantes Society of America 43.1 (Spring 2023): 212–214. 

Review of Knowing Fictions: Picaresque Reading in the Early Modern Hispanic World, by Barbara Fuchs.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.  Modern Language Quarterly 83.2 (June 2022): 235–38. 

Review of Cervantes’ “Persiles” and the Travails of Romance, ed. Marina S. Brownlee.  Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2019.  Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 42.1 (Spring 2022): 234–37. 

Review of ‘Aunque es el cielo de la tierra’: Lo religioso en el “Persiles” en diálogo con la obra cervantina, by Blanca Santos de la Morena.  Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2019.  Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 45.2 (Winter 2021 [2023]): 520–22. 

Review of The Art of Cervantes in “Don Quixote”: Critical Essays, ed. Stephen Boyd, Trudi Darby, and Terence O’Reilly.  Cambridge: Legenda, 2019.  Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 44.2 (Winter 2020 [2021]): 531–34. 

Review of The Sublime South: Andalusia, Orientalism, and the Making of Modern Spain, by José Luis Venegas.  Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018.  Hispanófila 187 (December 2019): 182–84. 

“Lessons on Colonial Monuments from an Unlikely Place.”  CounterPunch 22 September 2017.

Review of Pain: A Cultural History, by Javier Moscoso.  Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.  Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 17.1 (2016): 107–09. 

“Don Quixote, Charlie Hebdo, and the Politics of Laughter: From Satire to Schadenfreude.”  Dissident Voice 29 April 2015.

Review of USA Cervantes: 39 cervantistas en Estados Unidos, ed. Georgina Dopico Black and Francisco Layna Ranz.  Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas / Ediciones Polifemo, 2009.  Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 33.1 (Spring 2013): 223–26.

Review of An Early Modern Dialogue with Islam: Antonio de Sosa’s Topography of Algiers (1612), ed. María Antonia Garcés.  Trans. Diana de Armas Wilson.  Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011.  Hispania 95.3 (September 2012): 547–48. 

Review of Subject Stages: Marriage, Theatre, and the Law in Early Modern Spain, by María M. Carrión.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.  Gestos 51 (April 2011): 189–90.