Biography
Mónica Bolufer is Professor of Early Modern History, ca. 1500-1800.
Before joining the European University Institute, she was Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Valencia (2017-2024) and PI of the ERC project CIRGEN: Circulating Gender in the Global Enlightenment. Ideas, Networks, Agencies (2019-2024). She has also been Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Université de Toulouse 2-Jean Jaurès, University of Cambridge, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, among other academic institutions.
Her research focuses on the Spanish world in a European and global context. She has worked on debates on gender, on women’s intellectual activities in the Enlightenment, on politeness and the making of subjectivities, and on cultural transfers (translation, travel, correspondence). Her books include Arte y artificio de la vida en común (Art and Artifice of Life in Common, award of the Spanish Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for best monograph in 2019), Hombres y mujeres en la Historia (Women and Men in History, 2018), La vida y la escritura en el siglo XVIII (Life and Writing in the Eighteenth Century, 2008) and Mujeres e Ilustración (Women and Enlightenment,1998). She has also coedited The Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment (with Elizabeth F. Lewis and Catherine M. Jaffe, 2020), European Modernities and the Passionate South (with Xavier Andreu, 2023), Gender and Cultural Mediation in the Long Eighteenth Century (with Laura Guinot-Ferri and Carolina Blutrach, 2024), together with other essay-collections.
Her current work explores the role of emotions and gender in the making and unmaking of empires, using as sources transnational and transatlantic correspondence as well as fiction. Two other side projects involve the connections between eighteenth century Italian and Spanish women intellectuals, and the study of female egodocuments for exploring maternal experience and authority, as well as imagined mobilities and cosmopolitanism.