Ben Post is an assistant professor of Spanish at Murray State University. He teaches topics from entry-level language courses to Spanish-language theater and colonial literature of Latin America, which are his research specialties. After graduating with a B.A. in Spanish from Calvin College in 2009, Post went on to receive his M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011 and 2016, respectively. Post is involved in many areas of his department such as serving as faculty advisor for ICALA (International Cultures and Languages Association), working at the Spanish Conversation Tables, and serving as a project advisor for the global languages senior seminar, among other involvements.
During his doctoral work, Post began acting in student and faculty productions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, including playing the roles of Cortés in Sabina Berman’s ¿Águila o sol?, Benito Repollo in Cervantes’s El retablo de las maravillas, and Señor Tepán in Fernando Arrabal’s Pic-nic. He also directed a student production of Valentín Andrés Álvarez’s Tararí. His time as an actor and director strengthened his love for Latin American theater and supported his work in that area at Murray State when he helped with the Fall 2017 production of the Chilean play, Praying Mantis.
Research
Post’s research centers around the colonial Americas, theater, and religion, and he prefers to write about the intersection of all three. His interests include more specific topics, he says, such as “(T)he many ways Native American groups responded to the shock of contact and conquest; the speed with which the Spanish culture morphed as it adjusted to new realities; and the fascinating stories of all the other ethnic and religious groups in this area.” Post also enjoys writing about the theater developed in these areas and their religious history.
Recently, Post has been researching plays that deal with crypto-religion, which is the secret practicing of religious beliefs after they have been made illegal. He published two articles in 2018 centering around potentially crypto-Jewish Fernán González de Eslava, a 16th-century playwright who immigrated to Mexico from Spain in his youth. This playwright has sixteen surviving plays, most of which “use current events to allegorize religious doctrine,” according to Post. The plays contain references to different historical events such as the conquest of the Philippines, Muslim-Christian warfare in the Mediterranean, and Judaism. For his articles, Post analyzed the plays “as a part of a paradoxical strategy of representation in Mexico, where Judaism was simultaneously absent… and always present.”
Additionally, Post is planning to write a third article in the same vein on crypto-Judaism. This last article will focus on a play called The Antichrist written by Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, a Mexican playwright who worked for the colonial Spanish bureaucracy. Post’s article will be a contemplation of why this playwright, a man who grew up in an area of Mexico with a large secret Jewish population, would make the majority of the characters in his play Jewish. Post would also like to inspect the play’s rich performance history, including violent interruptions, and the play’s print history.
Another article that Post will be working on in the near future investigates Native American issues in the colonial Americas. He has received a research grant from CHFA which he will use to spend the semester and part of the summer learning the language of the Aztecs: Classical Nahuatl. The language is used in a number of influential documents from the era of Spanish occupation in the Americas, which Post will be using to explore two themes: “pre-contact theatrical traditions like ixiptla, in which priests impersonated the gods by, at times, wearing the flayed skin of sacrificial victims; and the post-contact corpus of missionary plays.” Lastly, Post hopes to integrate the new information and texts he is studying into his Native American Literature in Spanish course in Fall 2019.
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