adam mahler





translator and scholar  
of the medieval to modern iberian world


cv
email
academia.edu





recent publications

“En Este Som de Negrada”: Sounds of Blackness in the Medieval Iberian Lyric

“Ai flores, ai flores do verde pino”: The Ecopoetics of the Galician-Portuguese Pine Forest

Camilo Pessanha’s Missing City: Race, Poetry, and Urban Writing in Portuguese Macau

I received a B.A. in English and Portuguese Literature from Yale College in 2017. I am currently completing my dissertation on premodern environmental writing at Harvard University. In 2025, I was appointed Corresponding Member of the Institute of Medieval Studies at NOVA University Lisbon. I study the relationship between literary form and social change in the Iberian world, that is, Portugal, Spain, and their former colonial territories in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. 

I’m also a literary translator from the Spanish and Portuguese. My first book of translations, Camilo Pessanha’s Clepsydra and Other Poems, was published, in 2022, with Tagus Press at the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth. My annotated translation and edition of Shem Tov Ardutiel's Moral Proverbs and Other Old Castilian Poems Written by Jews is forthcoming with Harvard University Press's Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library.

My research and translations have been supported by grants from the US-Portugal Fulbright Commission, Spain's Ministry of Sport and Culture, and PEN America. My articles have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Speculum, La corónica, and Hispanic Review, among others. I am a regular contributor to the Gulbenkian Foundation's Colóquio/Letras, for which I review contemporary Portuguese poetry.

I designed and taught the first-ever Ladino courses at Harvard and UC–Berkeley. I welcome contact with scholars and educators interested in promoting and preserving Ladino in its many forms. 



פור אינדי טאל אמיגו · נון אה קומו איל ליברו · פורה לוש שאביוש דיגו · קי קון טורפיש נון מי ליברו