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LLILAS presents the 2025 Hackett LectureSor Juana at San Jerónimo: Reflections 330 Years after Her Death
Sara Poot-Herrera, University of California Santa Barbara
Thursday, April 10 | 2:00pm
2nd Floor Conference Room
Benson Latin American Collection
In this lecture, Sara Poot-Herrera marks significant months at the beginning and end of the convent life of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (c. 1648–1695), a 17th-century Mexican intellectual, writer, theologian, politician, and artist.
Sor Juana entered the Convent of San Jerónimo in Mexico City in February 1668 and died there on April 17, 1695. It was in San Jerónimo—a community of women—that she produced her literary and religious works. Through the lens of gender, Poot-Herrera revisits the convent space and the writings of Sor Juana that exemplify female agency. Certain period genres, such as Christmas carols (villancicos), were transformed in Sor Juana’s writing. In fact, she would become widely known for these compositions, some of which became mainstays of the Catholic Church both inside Mexico and beyond.
Sor Juana’s contributions continue to have an impact today due to both her genius and to the multidimensional thematic and formal fabric of freedom evident in her work and in her conception of the human being.
Sara Poot-Herrera is professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Santa Barbara, and a leading Sor Juana scholar. She was named "Woman of the Year" by the Los Angeles–based Mexican-American Opportunity Foundation in 1997 for her works on Sor Juana, and she received a prize from the University of the Cloister of Sor Juana in Mexico City.
Free and open to the public. For more information, contact Paloma Díaz at [email protected].
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Benson Latin American Collection, 2300 Red River Street, Austin, TX, United States
