Professor Bass's research crosses the disciplinary borders of literature and culture, as well as art history and history. Her book The Drama of the Portrait: Theater and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, 2008) won the 2010 Eleanor Tufts Award from the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies. She is also co-editor of the MLA volume Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Spanish Drama (2006) and guest editor/co-editor of special issues of the Bulletin of the Comediantes (2014, 2019). She has published articles and book chapters on theater and visual culture, fashion and urbanism, as well as authorship, poetics, and literary canon formation in edited volumes and journals in the USA, the UK, Spain, and Peru. She is currently working on a book titled Literary Lives of Early Modern Madrid: Local Belonging in an Imperial Capital. She is also collaborating with art historian Tanya Tiffany on the first edition and translation of the seventeenth-century autobiography of the painter-nun Estefanía de la Encarnación, to be published in the renowned series the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto).
Professor Bass has held several elected positions in several professional organizations (MLA Executive Committee of 16th-17th-Century Spanish drama, Hispanic Literature Discipline Representative for the Renaissance Society of America, the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, and the Cervantes Society of America). She has been book review editor for Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry and is currently book review editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes.
