Francisco Peña Fernández

Professor at the Department of Languages and World Literatures at the University of British Columbia and Coordinator of the World Literatures Program. He earned his BA in Ancient and Medieval History at the Universidad de Sevilla (Spain) his PhD in Hebrew Philology and Religious Studies at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) and his PhD in Medieval Spanish Literature at the University of California, Davis.

His research is wide-ranging and interdisciplinary in nature. It spans Medieval Studies, Literary and Biblical Studies, and Religious Studies. His research engage in a synthesizing analysis of literature, history, and religion so as to develop new understandings of Medieval Iberian cultures. It currently focuses on the connections between Christian and Jewish exegetical traditions, examining Jewish writers that worked on Biblical texts, to piece together the connections between historical religious knowledge and the communities of learned people that created central texts of the period. He has contributed to a rich debate on the role of Judaism in Christian thought in Medieval Spain, which has largely divided American and Spanish medievalists.