BM, Violin Performance, Florida State University (2005); MA, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia (2007).

Lucia Martinez is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English.  She works primarily in early modern English poetry and non-dramatic prose, with a focus on Reformation politics and poetics.  Her dissertation is titled Making a Solemn Note: The Music and Measure of English Reformation Psalms, and argues that metrical psalms produced in the sixteenth century--namely those found in early modern England's bestselling book, the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter--were central to the development of the idea of post-medieval English "poetry." Her other current (and ongoing) interests include the lyric poetry of Sidney and Donne, music in Milton, family dynamics in Shakespeare, Spenser's shorter works and letters, and the science of cognitive poetics.  

Lucia's research has been supported by a William Fontaine Fellowship, as well as the Pew Presidential Prize and a grant-in-aid from the Folger Shakespeare Library.  From 2011-2012, she was co-coordinator of the Medieval-Renaissance Seminar, and organized the 2011 Phyllis Rackin Lecture, delivered by Will Fisher.  Lucia has taught seminars for Penn's Critical Writing Program on linguistics and literature; in 2012, she taught a survey of Western civilization in the Liberal Arts program at Philadelphia's University of the Arts.  In 2013, she will teach a seminar at Penn on aesthetics and literature titled "Beauty and the Text," as well as the "Relocations" seminar in the PennCAP/Pre-Freshman Program.