Michael R. Gordon

Michael Gordon teaches Masters seminars on Don Quixote and undergraduate courses on Spanish Golden Age literature and civilization. He also has organized interdisciplinary seminars in UNCW’s Honors College and led semester-long study abroad programs in Spain for undergraduates. Dr. Gordon’s primary research interests are Jewish characters and interreligious encounters in Miguel de Cervantes’s North African and Eastern Mediterranean captivity plays and novelas. His forthcoming book, A Way Back Home: Jewish Return to Cervantes’s Spain (University of Toronto Press), focuses on those themes. Dr. Gordon completed a research fellowship in 2017 at the Università di Verona, and based on his investigations there, he published articles about the relationship between narrative frames and the strong female characters in Boccaccio’s Decameron and Cervantes’s works of prose. Dr. Gordon is currently exploring his other research interests of science and science fiction in Cervantes’s masterpiece (Don Quixote), which will be the focus of his second book.

Education

PhD in Spanish Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison
MA in Spanish, Middlebury College
BA in Spanish and History, Duke University

Professional Service

Dr. Gordon currently serves as the coordinator for UNCW's Master's program in Spanish, Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Hispanic Studies, and Combined Spanish BA/MA Program.
Dr. Gordon has been UNCW's Faculty Athletics Representative (FAR) since 2019.
Dr. Gordon has been co-advisor to UNCW Hillel since 2018.