Faculty in Residence

Patricia Grieve – West Campus Faculty In Residence

Patricia E. Grieve holds the Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Professorship in the Humanities, and is the Chair of Literature Humanities. After earning her B.A. and M.A. at Purdue, she took the Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures at Princeton. Grieve taught at Williams College and Brown University before coming to Columbia in 1985, where she was awarded tenure in 1992, promoted to full professor in 1997, and named to the Marcus Professorship in 2001.

She teaches Literature Humanities, courses on medieval and early modern Spain, and comparative courses on Spain, England, Italy, and France. Her scholarship focuses on the development of Western narrative and the role that stories and storytelling play in shaping and reflecting cultures. She teaches courses on comparative novella and short fiction, hagiography, medieval romance, and Golden Age Spain, especially the works of Cervantes. A recipient of multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as from Spain’s Ministry of Culture, the Warburg Institute and the John Carter Brown Library, Grieve is the author of many articles and three books, Desire and Death in the Spanish Sentimental Romance 1440-1550, Floire and Blancheflor and the European Romance (reissued in paperback in 2006) and the forthcoming, The Eve of Spain: Myths of Origins in the History of Christian, Muslim and Jewish Conflict (Johns Hopkins UP, March 2009). Grieve’s latest book project--for which she received an NEH Summer grant in 2005--Tweaking the Saints’ Tales in Cervantes and Maria de Zayas, studies how both authors cleverly utilized spiritual and devotional texts in order to craft their own imaginative fictions and give voice to their society’s marginalized members, especially women and religious minorities.

At Columbia, Grieve was the Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese for ten years, and served as chair of the Executive Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Faculty Development Committee, Literature Humanities, and the undergraduate Committees on the Core and on Major Cultures. In the 1990s, she helped develop the popular Latin American courses for Major Cultures, Latin American Humanities I and II, and wrote the teaching manual on Colonial Latin America. She is currently Chair of the Committee on the Core and Committee on Major Cultures, and serves on the Executive Committee of the Heyman Center, the governing board of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, and the President’s Task Force on Undergraduate Education.

Professors Patricia Grieve, Don Hood and Nancy Epstein