Room 246, Mandel Building, Mt. Scopus Campus | liora.ortega@mail.huji.ac.il

 

Liora Ortega is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies, and was a President's Stipend recipient at the Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities before joining the Mandel Scholion Center as a Ph.D. member of the “Passivities” Research Group. Liora holds a BA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute and a Master’s in Spanish and Latin American Studies from the Hebrew University.

In her Ph.D. dissertation, which is written under the supervision of Prof. Ruth Fine, Liora explores how Habsburg Spain’s ecclesiastical and political discourse championed the public display of visual icons to typify the infidel, whether Muslim, Jewish, or New Christian suspect. She focuses critically on playwrights who staged a subversive emphasis on the negative function of visual representation, thereby parading a differential, and often satirical, restructuring of Counter-Reformist statutes of iconic devotion.