Giovanni F. Salazar Calvo

Biography

Giovanni F. Salazar-Calvo is a native of Cartago, Costa Rica. He obtained a BA in Classical Philology at The University of Costa Rica, a MA in Spanish from Western Michigan University, and currently is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Cultural Studies (ABD) at Michigan State University. He is  Editorial Assistant of Revista de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades (REGS) (sponsored by the Asociación de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades, the Department of Romance and Classical Studies, and the College of Arts & Letters and published by MSU Press).

In 2021, he received the Varg-Sullivan Award in Arts and Letters (College of Arts & Letters, Michigan State University) for the best published article written by a Graduate Student: “‘Los que comen coca son hicheseros’: demonología y la coca en la obra de Guamán Poma de Ayala.”

Thanks to the Tinker Field Research Grant (CLACS), he conducted archival research at the National Archives of the Nation and the National Library Mexico City (2019).

In 2017, he also received the Everett Hesse Graduate Student Travel Grant Competition (Association for Hispanic Classical Theater Symposium of Golden Age Theater) for the best Graduate Student paper: “Relación entre medicina y hechicería femeninas en El amor médico de Tirso de Molina: una denuncia paradójica de la mala praxis médica.”

Research Interests: Colonial Latin American literatures and cultures and transatlantic early modern studies. Spanish early modern natural and moral depictions of marginalized, non-Christian belief systems (practices associated with the Occult and Witchery, Mesoamerican and Mestizo religions) in their relation to nature. Religious and medicinal customs associated with the consumption of psychoactive plants (cannabis, jimsonweed, peyote cactus, tobacco, magic mushrooms, etc.) at both sides of the Atlantic (witches, indigenous shamans).