- Ph.D., Columbia University, 1999
- M.A., Columbia Universtiy, 1992
- B.A., Concordia University, 1991

Steven Wagschal
Department Chair, Spanish and Portuguese
Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Department Chair, Spanish and Portuguese
Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
My main area of research is early modern Spanish literature and culture, and specifically, the analysis of textual expressions of mental phenomena, including emotional experience (disgust and jealousy), sensory perception (sight, taste and smell), and non-human animal cognition (emotions, sensations, theory of mind, phenomenal consciousness, etc.). As a humanities scholar, I examine specific cultural products created by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary authors including Cervantes, Calderón, De Zayas, and Garcilaso; non-fiction writers such as Martínez Espinar and Fernández de Oviedo; and visual artists such as Velázquez and De Gheyn. My most recent monograph, Minding Animals in the Old and New Worlds (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018) pushes at the intersections of literary-cultural studies, cognitive science and animal studies, exploring the understanding of non-human animals in the Iberian world, from the Middle Ages through the Early Modern period in different contexts and through various modes of discursive writing.
I am interested in the beliefs that people have held about the cognitive faculties of non-human animals and I evaluate to what extent these beliefs fall in line with current scientific understanding of these faculties in animals. Since ideas about suffering are inextricably tied up with human morality, a lack of appreciation for animal suffering tends to lessen the sense of moral responsibility humans have towards specific individuals or groups of animals. In other recent research, I explore the cognition of human literary characters.
Minding Animals in the Old and New Worlds: A Cognitive Historical Analysis (2018)
Steven Wagschal
University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division.
Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200–1750 (2018)
Ryan D Giles and Steven Wagschal
University of Toronto Press.
The Smellscape of Don Quixote: A Cognitive Approach (2012)
Steven Wagschal
Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 32 (1), 125
The literature of jealousy in the age of Cervantes (2006)
Steven Wagschal
University of Missouri Press.
Medicine, Morality, Madness: Competing Models of Insanity in Calderón's El mayor monstruo del mundo (2008)
Steven Wagschal
Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos, 227-245
" Mas no cabrás allá": Gongora's Early Modern Representation of the Modern Sublime (2002)
Steven Wagschal
Hispanic review, 70 (2), 169-189
Contemporary Cinematic Tragedy and the ‘Silver-Lining’Genre (2014)
Sandra Shapshay and Steven Wagschal
The British Journal of Aesthetics, 54 (2), 161-174
Digging up the past: the archeology of emotion in Cervantes'" Romance de los celos" (2007)
Steven Wagschal
Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 27 (2), 213-228
Writing on the Fractured T: Gongora's Iconographic Evocations of Vulcan, Venus and Mars (2004)
Steven Wagschal
Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age, 130-50
Don Quixote, the Skeptical Reader and the Nature of Reality (2013)
Steven Wagschal
Iberoamericana-Vervuert. 139-54