Mary Quinn’s dissertation, National Genres, Nostalgic Identities: Self and Other in Early Modern Spain, explores the reverberations of the formation of the nation and the empire of Spain in the literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Using song texts, early forms of the novel, and episodes of Don Quixote, Quinn, a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, aims to demonstrate the way national identity was constructed. She explores the use of different genres or generic modes and traces the depiction of different peoples — specifically Muslims and moriscos—and their relation to the newly hegemonic culture of Christianity. In so doing, she tracks the emergence of a national and imperial discourse that is nostalgic and idealizing, one that establishes a tone of disillusionment that persists in Spanish literature long after the reconquest of 1492.