Professor Ponce's first book, Cervantes the Poet: The Don Quijote, Poetic Practice and the Conception of the First Modern Novel , revaluates the rise of the novel in late sixteenth-century Spain through the relationship between Lyric, Novel, and Romance in the works of Miguel de Cervantes and his contemporaries.  While the discourse of modernity has frequently turned to subjectivity as one of its central features, the Pre-Cartesian formulations of subjectivity that emerged in the eroticized pastoral culture of late sixteenth-century communities of poets invite us to reconsider the ways in which human experience was conceptualized and given literary life in this formative period of the early modern. This work addresses questions of literary genre through a dialectic of historical particularities and transhistorical forms of literary art, and takes special interest in the relationship between the mythic and the epistemic in historical, philosophical, and imaginative (or poetic) outlooks.  Her second project, A Poetry Without an Imperium, takes the poetry of sixteenth-century Sicily as a case study of the lyric at work in a langauge deprived of claims to nation or empire.  Her articles have appeared in the MLN, Romance Studies, and the Anuario de Estudios Cervantinos.